Papa Roach – Infest (2000)

April 22, 2023

I absolutely loved this album when I was a kid. Back then, in the golden year that was 2000, where the world was changing and looking forward to a brand new millenium (what a dissapointment, eh?), 10-year-old me and one of my best friends, Alex, went to the local Woolworths, money burning a hole in our pockets, and we bought our first ever albums. I bought Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory (the first album I ever owned – but the first album I ever heard was either S/T Gorillaz or Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP), and Alex bought Papa Roach’s Infest.

“What’s that?” he asked me, looking at my CD in disgust. “That looks terrible. Mine looks class.”

I always remember this little exchange because for a long time, Papa Roach faded into obscurity with sub-par albums whilst Linkin Park (not that I remained a fan for long) went on to break through the stratosphere and mature their sound constantly until their untimely end.

Anyway, Alex soon got sick of Infest, after listening to “Last Resort” and “Blood Brothers” (because it was on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2) about 50 gazillion times. One day, I borrowed the CD from him to copy it, and, well, I never gave it back.

I’ve reached the point in the review where I should probably talk about what the album sounds like. And this is what is really interesting to me: for something that is as over-produced and homogenised as Infest, it really still does have it’s own unique sound. You can tell instantly whilst listening to it, despite a million other bands sounding like this at the time, that you are listening to Papa Roach and you are listening to Infest.

Maybe I’m looking at this with rose-tinted glasses, but there are some bangers here. I can unironically listen to this whole album all the way through and not really start to lose interest until “Binge” comes on towards the end. Infest is just loaded with banger after banger after banger. Nu metal classics for the masses, for sure, as well as some deeper cuts like “Revenge” and “Snakes”, which are both so fucking bad that they are downright amazing (“Rememba da gurl, abused wit forks, knives an’ razor blades!”, or “I got a problem wit da snakes that are crawl-in’, thru my area when da darkness has fall-en'” lmao).

I dunno, I clearly have a lot of nostaglia for this thing, hence the long, glowing review. Objectively, it’s incredibly well produced, almost as clean as a pop record, and in reality its probably not a very good record, but I enjoy the absolute shit out of this, even today.