When Limp Bizkit did it all for the nookie back in 1999, it was hardly the first, nor certainly the last time a heavy band sung about sex.
Indeed, from proto-metal yellers like Robert Plant screechin' about someone squeezin' Led Zeppelin's lemons dry, to the dirty talkers of the Sunset Strip hair-metal scene, to the stinkfisted alt-metal of TOOL, primal urges have been getting hard-hitting musicians' blood pumping for eons. But who did it best?
We asked Revolver readers to pick the greatest heavy songs about sex — or about the nookie, if you will. And while some of the depraved death-metal odes y'all voted for might put you on a watchlist, these five were ultimately the biggest vote-getters.
5. Type O Negative - "Love You to Death"
The beast inside Peter Steele compelled him to write "Love You to Death," a Type O classic that had the goth-metal icon beggin' for sweet relief. Despite the singer's sex-symbol status by this point of the Nineties, or that this slow-swerved doom ballad is apparently covered in a bawdy veneer of breast sweat, "Love You to Death" is seemingly more about unfulfilled desired.
Though he tees off the song suggesting that his "beast" is gonna get you, by song's end he's self-sabotaging that libidinous braggadocio with howl-haunted uncertainty ("Am I good enough for you?"). Navigating sex and love can complicated, to say the least.
4. Danzig - "She Rides"
"She Rides," the sleaze-heavy roadhouse-metal standout from Danzig's eponymous solo debut, is about a lot of things. Coitus, foremost among them.
Danzig's own guitarist, John Christ, called the slow-dirge pounder the band's "first sex song," but the tune also draws a lot of influence from the myth of Lilith, personified here as "death in a cool black dress." While there's a sublime poetry to how Danzig croons about a creature of the night forever bonding us to an unknown darkness, his lines about sin running down her back take this one into XXX territory.
3. Deftones - "You've Seen the Butcher"
The whole Deftones catalog sounds hella horny, in no small part due to the nocturnal moaning frontman Chino Moreno has leaned on for the past 30 years. Per a recent study, the Sacramento titans are in fact the most-listened-to metal band on people's "sex playlists."
"You've Seen the Butcher" is particularly erotic, creeping along at a blues-gnarled alt-groove pace, while Moreno, apparently setting up a video camera mid-verse, prepares to show the world what's exploding from inside his bedroom.
A delicate balance between intimacy and exhibitionism, "You've Seen the Butcher" is diamond-eyed, grade-A debauchery from Deftones.
2. Nine Inch Nails - "Closer"
A true masterwork and a strip-club classic, "Closer" is a hot-and-bothered funk-dustrial anthem like no other — a dangerous-sounding, uniquely devotional perv-out that's scored a million goth nights.
A crunching digi-snare comes down like a dominatrix's spiked stiletto heel; staccato synths run tense and steamy. Trent Reznor, meanwhile, seethes with sensual intensity through that animalistic, BDSM-adjacent breathiness, somehow presenting as both dom and sub as he contemplates pain, pleasure and existence itself.
1. Korn - "A.D.I.D.A.S."
There's something curiously tragic and hauntingly believable about Korn's second Life Is Peachy single.
Just barely hidden behind that athleisure acronym (All Day I Dream About Sex) and the sophomorically fun sing-along chorus is a tale of obsession and escape, with Jonathan Davis' playing an isolated, trembly-voiced nobody strokin' up an immersive fantasy world where they're on top, for once ("Screwing might be the only way that I can truly be free from my fucked-up reality.")
Like "Closer" before it, this sex-themed classic is a helluva lot darker than it might seem on first listen. All the more reason to blast it on repeat.
