Limp Bizkit have always had their fair share of haters, and Slayer guitarist Kerry King was one of them. In fact, the thrash shredder was so frustrated by the nu-metal band's massive rise to fame at the end of the 90s that he genuinely considered quitting music altogether.
In a 2017 interview with uDiscover (dug up by Metal Hammer), King reflected on how he felt about metal in the late 90s, when nu-metal had completely supplanted thrash as the dominant form of heavy music and bands in Slayer's class were struggling to keep up with the times. This all came to a head for King and Co. when they made 1998's divisive Diabolus In Musica, in which they blatantly embraced trendy styles of nu-metal and alt-metal in favor of thrash, leaving many fans disappointed.
"I was really jaded for a while back in the late 90s," King said of that time "I couldn't understand why Limp Bizkit was big. It affected me — I didn't want to play music. I thought, 'If this is the way that music's going, then fuck this, I hate it'.
"That's why Jeff Hanneman wrote so much of our 1998 album, Diabolus in Musica, which is too funky for me."
Doubling down on his critique of Diabolus in Musica, King added: "That's the one record that I really paid not enough attention to because I was really bitter about what kind of music was popular. I thought it was, was very frat boy stuff, and maybe that's why it was popular, I don't know. So Diabolus didn't get as much attention from me because, you know, we didn't stay in focus. Looking back we were just saying, 'Alright, how do we make Slayer fit into today's society?' But, that's probably my least favorite record of our history. That's our Turbo [Judas Priest's glammy, synth-assisted and widely disliked 1986 album]."
For what it's worth, in 2018, Revolver published a defense of Diabolus, which we dubbed "Slayer's most hated album." You can read that here.
