KORN released their self-titled debut album on October 11th, 1994 through Immortal and Epic, recorded in May and June at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu with Ross Robinson, who had also produced the 1993 demo "Neidermayer's Mind." Sixty-six minutes, and generally treated as the first nu metal album: seven-string guitars tuned into the floor, hip-hop rhythmic phrasing, and Jonathan Davis writing directly about child abuse, bullying and drug abuse. "Faget" came out of his high school years being harassed for wearing eyeliner and liking new wave; "Shoots and Ladders" pulls apart the buried meanings in nursery rhymes. It reached only number seventy-two on the Billboard 200 but had sold over 2.1 million copies in the United States by 2003. Rolling Stone later called it the most important metal record of the previous twenty years, and Loudwire has named it the greatest nu metal album ever made.
