Storming out of Riverside, California, USA in 1995, Alien Ant Farm is a rap rock band that came to prominence during the Nu-Metal boom of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The group have released four albums and are best known for their cover of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal”.
Trust me on this, there is far more to this band than just that single. In fact, Alien Ant Farm is one of the true originals on Nu-Metal, coming together the year after Korn changed the face of heavy metal with their self-titled debut album.
The band was something pretty unique within the scene itself, a band that had a sense of humour about themselves. For one, their band name came to original lead guitarist Terry Corso through a surprisingly existential thought.
He wondered whether all life on Earth had come from an experiment done by, in his words “entities from other dimensions”, and that we were being monitored by those same creatures like we were living in some kind of Alien Ant Farm.
I’m sure it was a train of thought that had nothing to do with certain smokeable substance whatsoever. At all. Anyway, they stood out at a time when Nu-Metal was a mainstream concern, so of course they were going to be big. It was at that point that “Smooth Criminal” was released; in the lead up to their first major label release “ANThology”.
It went to number one in Australia and New Zealand, top three in the U.K and topped the Modern Rock charts in the U.S. If you were alive and not living under a rock in the summer of 2001, you definitely heard it many times.
Since then the band has released a handful of albums. The band toured solidly through the 2000s as well, performing shows with the likes of Hoobastank, Fuel and on the Vans Warped Tour. There are fewer bands around with more live experience than them. And a night out with Alien Ant Farm, will surely be a night to remember.
Paul Heaton
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