Infest (album)

Infest is the second studio album and major-label debut by the American rock band Papa Roach. It was released through DreamWorks Records on April 25, 2000. The sound on the album is nu metal and rap metal, with many songs containing rapped vocals and hip hop influences. It was certified 4× Platinum in the U.S. on December 6, 2024, making it the band's best-selling album, peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 chart, and became the 20th highest-selling album of 2000 in the United States. Infest earned Papa Roach a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist.

Prior to the release of Infest in 2000, Papa Roach released three EPs and one studio album. The band formed in 1993 as a funk metal and rap rock outfit. In 1994, Papa Roach released their first extended play titled Potatoes for Christmas. The seven song EP was originally released on cassette by dB Records. Potatoes for Christmas was later re-released on CD in 2003. Papa Roach's first studio album, Old Friends from Young Years, was released in 1997. The album failed to get the band a record deal. In April 1998, Papa Roach's second EP, 5 Tracks Deep, was released and contained five songs, only one of which, "Thrown Away", would later be re-recorded. In 1999, the band's third EP, ...Let Em Know!, was released. Only one track, "Walking Thru Barbed Wire", from the EP would not be re-recorded for Infest; the song, however, would be re-recorded for the band's third studio album, Lovehatetragedy (2002).

A demo was released in 1999 featuring the songs "Last Resort", "Broken Home", "She Loves Me Not" (the only song which would not be on Infest, instead being re-recorded for Lovehatetragedy), "Infest", and "Dead Cell". Papa Roach toured in 1999; the band had an underground fan base in California. Due to the underground success of the 1999 demo heard by in house producers Tim & Bob, they started working with the band and eventually got Papa Roach signed to DreamWorks Records.

Papa Roach went to the studio in late of 1999 to record Infest. Though many songs including "Last Resort", "Broken Home", "Revenge", and "Dead Cell" had already been recorded, the band re-recorded them and made some changes to the lyrics. Three songs on the album, "Dead Cell", "Revenge", and "Snakes", feature additional musicians. "Dead Cell" includes additional vocals by Aimee Echo, formerly of Human Waste Project, and Rodney Duke, while both "Revenge" and "Snakes" include scratches by Adam "DJ AM" Goldstein. The closing track "Thrown Away" contains a softer, reggae-inspired version of the song "Tightrope", which starts at about 4:57. Papa Roach completed recording the album by early 2000.

The sound and genres utilized on Infest got compared to the band Rage Against the Machine, with guitarist Jerry Horton saying, "There are basic similarities considering we both do hip-hop and rock, but there's so many other bands doing that, too."

In April 2023, when discussing the record's sound, lead vocalist Jacoby Shaddix said:

We didn't sound anything like Staind. We didn't sound anything like Deftones. We didn't sound anything like Korn. Yeah, we were heavy, but we had our own brand of it.

Infest's opening title track is, according to Shaddix, "the manifesto for the band." The lead single, "Last Resort", is about the attempted suicide of one of Shaddix's friends. Shaddix stated the event was "really traumatic for me to be around, because I'm a 17-year-old kid, and one of my best buds tried to kill himself. That was just fucking heavy. Heavy on me, and all of our friend circle." The second single, "Broken Home", was recorded in order for Shaddix "to kind of like be at peace with" his "childhood and this brokenness that I had inside myself, this hole in my heart growing up in a broken home and not having my father in my life, and that was a real struggle for me as a kid, and as a young adult." The fourth and final single, "Dead Cell", is, lyrically, about an individual who is "void of a soul."