Mudvayne Turns Back the Clock and Looks to the Future

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Musicians and their fans know that’s true all too well. How many times do you see bands break up or call it quits, only to get back together and play sold-out reunion shows afterwards?

Chad Gray, the blood-stained lead singer of nu-metal mavens Mudvayne, is experiencing that now with the subgenre he and his bandmates help popularize in the early 2000s becoming cool again thanks to Gen Z FOMO nostalgia.

“There’s an absolute resurgence,” he says. “We’re bigger now than we’ve ever been.”

Mudvayne — which has had the same cast of guitarist Greg Tribbett, drummer Matthew McDonough and bassist Ryan Martinie since its 2000 debut, L.D. 50  — took a hiatus for over a decade, during which Gray focused on fronting supergroup Hellyeah, before resuming in 2021. Now, Gray knows what his former Hellyeah brother Vinnie Paul Abbott was talking about.

“He was like, ‘Dude, Pantera was bigger since we haven’t been playing than we ever were when we were together,’” he says of the late drummer god’s words of wisdom. “That’s just the way it is. People want what they want when they can’t have it. They want it even more. There’s a natural excitement around something that you can’t even create.”

Mudvayne is happy to give the audience exactly what it wants during the L.D. 50 25^th anniversary tour (this year also marks twenty years since the third record, Lost and Found came out). The Denver stop is Tuesday, September 23, at the Fillmore Auditorium. Subgenre peers Static-X and nu-metal newcomers Vended are also on the bill.

When the album was finally ready to be released in the summer of 2000, nu-metal had already infiltrated the mainstream during a time when seeing such groups as Limp Bizkit, System of a Down or Slipknot on late-night TV felt totally normal. The creation of Ozzfest and its ability to put together bills featuring both legends — Black Sabbath, Pantera, Tool —and up-and-coming acts at the time — Korn, Lamb of God, The Black Dahlia Murder — also helped spread the swelling nu-metal wave.

“That’s the offering Ozzy gave us. The metal world can never repay him, not only for what he did with Sabbath, then his solo stuff with Ozzy, but the inspiration he created for so many young people,” Gray says. “Then he takes all these people who were inspired by him and put them on an Ozzy-sized stage for twenty-plus years and created some of the biggest bands of today from that Ozzfest venture that him and his wife put together. His giving to metal was completely selfless.”

And once L.D. 50 dropped, Mudvayne became an Ozzfest regular and household name alongside such peers, particularly behind the single “Dig” and a music video that played seemingly every hour on the newly rebranded MTV2 channel. Then there was the gruesome appearance at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards, when the four dressed up in their bloody best and took home the first-ever MTV2 Award, as voted on by the fans.   

“People just love that track,” Gray says, adding that whenever L.D. 50 hit the shelves, Mudvayne toured it for 26 months, including three separate opening slots for Slipknot.

“A lot of that was the ‘Dig’ momentum, which really didn’t come until 2001,” he continues. “We worked our fucking asses off, like any young hungry band does.”

And anyone who saw the band knew it wrote what would become one of the genre’s most recognizable tracks. Seriously, who doesn’t immediately hear that bassline in their head?

“When we wrote that song, it was like, ‘This thing is fucking money.’ That wasn’t even a song that was played in our showcase that got us a deal,” Gray recalls. “But you can tell by the response from the band. You can tell from the response from friends and people around us when we had just written it, like people hanging out with us at our practice space.”

It caught Sean “Clown” Crahan’s ear, too, after Mudvayne broke it out live during a New Year’s Eve gig supporting Slipknot.

“I remember playing that show with them and he was on the side of the stage,” Gray recalls. “He was like, ‘Man, I really like that song. That thing is fucking nasty.’”

Crahan, Slipknot’s keg-killing percussionist, also co-produced L.D. 50. His son Simon is now the drummer of Vended, alongside Corey Taylor kin, vocalist Griffin. Talk about a full-circle moment. But Mudvayne isn’t content with living in the past and rolling out a greatest-hits-only set. The band put out two new singles, “Sticks and Stones” and “Hurt People Hurt People,” this summer — its first original material in sixteen years. There might be more to come, too, Gray hints.

“I’m just going to embrace it and enjoy it and see what’s to come. I don’t know how these new songs are going to be received,” he says. “Our future kind of depends on what shakes out with these. We got another one, but let’s wait and see what people think of these. If people still want Mudvayne, we can give them Mudvayne.”

Mudvayne, with Static-X and Vended, 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, September 23, Fillmore Auditorium 1510 North Clarkson St. Tickets are $70.