Make Yourself by Incubus

Incubus could have been a band that flashed and disappeared, but they found their voice on Make Yourself.

There was a time when we thought Incubus would be just another rap-rock fusion band, along with bands like Limp Bizkit, Hed PE, and others. The late 90s were weird like that. Now that the band has been around so long, it’s hard to imagine how a band like Incubus could be jumbled together with the likes of Limp Bizkit, Staind, Snot, System of a Down, Korn, and Deftones. This always happens in weird genre moments. I remember a time when Coheed and Cambria was considered emo too. Anyway, Incubus was slotted in sloppily with some strange peers. Some of their early tours were with bands like 311 and Sugar Ray, not to mention Orgy, Rammstein, Korn, and Hed PE again. Back then, all that made sense somehow.

I was a college student at Boston University, and I told the story on this website already when talking about the first time I saw System of a Down on a co-headlining Sno-Core tour with Incubus. The quick version is that when Incubus was finished playing their set, all the pretty girls basically disappeared as the stinky boys took over the pit for System of a Down. I’m a heterosexual male, but I have no problem saying just how dreamy Brandon Boyd was singing his face off with his tongue sticking out of his mouth. It was enough to make the straightest male swoon out of reverence if not pure jealousy.

In February of 2000, I had already been listening to Incubus for a few years and they’d released their third album Make Yourself four months prior to the show. I’ll get into the songs a bit later, but they’d received pretty good radio airplay for both “Pardon Me,” and “Drive” by the time the tour rolled through town. Incubus was one of those bands that I had been on before their breakout hit. No, I wasn’t listening to their debut Fungus Amongus in 1995. In fact, after buying it at the used record store, I never really took to it at all. But I did love their second album SCIENCE from 1997.

The first song I ever listened to by Incubus was “Redefine.” The song opens with a hyped up opening that’s not as iconic as Korn’s “are you ready?” but it’s in that same vein. In that song, Incubus were droning pleasantly through a chorus like 311 after working their way through verses like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The guitars were appropriately chunky, and the turntables were front and center. That’s how the band led off their 1997 album S.C.I.E.N.C.E. and I was in, but to me they were kind of a one-hit wonder. I listened to the whole record and enjoyed it, but it never vaulted to the top of my stack of CDs. Yes, there are some really great songs, especially in hindsight. “Vitamin,” “New Skin,” “A Certain Shade of Green” and “Summer Romance” are all solid Incubus songs, but for me it never became vital music.

I loved it at the moment. I was going to shows all the time in this era, whether it was Soulfly or Sevendust, who seemingly opened up on every hard rock tour of the era. But it turned out that this would never be Incubus’ legacy.

The band released something wholly different in 1999 with their breakout hit album Make Yourself. In hindsight, we know exactly who Incubus is going to become with unbelievable records in a post-pop-metal world. The band went on to release Morning View and A Crow Left of the Murder in the early 2000s when other bands like Staind and Limp Bizkit were almost nowhere to be found.

But it all started with Make Yourself, which is a perfect title for a band that seemed to find its most vital sound. But how did they do it? I have some opinions on that. On Make Yourself, a few things helped set the direction for the band.

First of all, Brandon Boyd seems to find his most true melodic self in these song structures. There’s room for him to breathe life into the songs. The riffs are still there, and the band isn’t sitting back by any means, but there’s a maturity to the song structures that really let Boyd shine in ways he hadn’t on SCIENCE.

Secondly, it’s not exactly a departure from earlier work, but my friend Andrew and I have had conversations about Mike Einziger’s work on the guitar sound in Incubus. He has a tone and style that set him apart from many of his contemporaries. The guitar tones he achieves are a lot warmer than some of the colder, flatter chunky riffs of bands that I also love like Deftones and Chevelle. That tone comes to the forefront on Make Yourself. If you’re familiar with synesthesia, a perceptual phenomena, where one sense leads to involuntary responses in another sensual or cognitive pathway, the sound of Incubus guitars feel like warm reddish orangeish glow to me. When I think of Deftones, I get icy blues.

Make Yourself will always be known for its biggest hits like “Pardon Me,” “Stellar,” and of course, “Drive,” but it’s a wildly consistent record from beginning to end.

“Privilege” is a rocker that slams you with one of the biggest choruses on the record. It’s an orderly song structure that feels more accessible that some of the band’s earlier work that jumped from style to style, literally with record scratches.

“Nowhere Fast” begins and it could be Deftones or Snot or any number of Incubus’ contemporaries until it gets to the verse. The delayed guitars and Boyd’s vocals are accented with a whining little bass line before arriving in a soaring chorus that’s accented by drops. It’s the band finding how to be atmospheric and busy simultaneously.

I could go down every track, but I don’t want to do that, so now I’m going to focus in on the big hits.

Let’s start right at the top with “Drive.” Released in November of 2000, “Drive” was one of the biggest hits of the band’s career. It charted on the Billboard charts and had an epic video inspired by M.C. Escher’s hands drawing.

The band continues to honor this hit to this day. There’s no song the band has played more live according to Setlist.fm coming in at 966 and counting. I don’t mean to be “that guy,” but for me, it was never about “Drive.” I thought it was a cool song, but the next one I’m going to talk about remains my favorite song on Make Yourself.

“Pardon Me” is one of the most infectious rockers from any band in the late 90s. It’s a bit rap-rockish if I’m being honest, but it’s just a perfect chorus. “Pardon me while I burst into flames.” It was the lead single from the record and I can remember hearing it pop out from all the other songs on rock radio during the fall of 1999. This is the era where Santana’s “Smooth” was dominating the radio charts and songs like “Black Balloon” by the Goo Goo Dolls were popular. I am an unabashed fan of the Goos, but let’s just say “Pardon Me” stuck out in a good way.

The final song I’m going to talk about today is “Stellar.” I’m finishing with this one because as I’m looking back, I think it’s quietly the best song on the album. The guitar sound in the verses is almost magical. It might be the warmest of all guitar tones the Einziger achieves on the whole record and the inventiveness of his forms are easy to hear to everyone. It’s a song that sees the band in what I feel is their most natural state between heavy and chill. That balance and contrast has become their calling card moving forward.

I always tell people that Incubus is a band that I’ve seen a bunch, almost unintentionally. I saw them early on at the Sno-Core tour because I wanted to see System of a Down. I wanted to see Incubus too, but I was there for System. They also played the Innings Festival the first year we went, but we were there to see Eddie Vedder. Sure, Incubus blew us away, but it’s not the band that got us on that plane. Same with Louder than Life 2022. We were there to see Nine Inch Nails and Chevelle, and Incubus ended up being the ultimate bonus. They killed, unsurprisingly.

Incubus has put out some phenomenal music since Make Yourself. “Wish You Were Here,” “Dig,” “Are You In?” and “Nice to Know You” are incredible songs that fans can’t wait to hear at their live shows to this day. For my money, the best song of all of them is “Megalomaniac.” It reached the top of the rock charts, but it’s such a frenetic live song for the band. If you’re judging a song by crowd energy, it might be the highest energy of them all.

In 1999 Incubus had the 56th top-selling album of the year with 2.8 million records sold. It was edged out of 55 by the Phil Collins Tarzan soundtrack. Slipknot was 59 with just over 2.7 million records sold. Backstreet sold 40 million copies of Millenium and Britney sold 27 million copies of Baby One More Time for your reference. Blink 182 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers each sold 16 million copies of their records that year too. I don’t know if you find this trip down memory land of the record industry as fascinating as I do. These days we’re counting spotify plays. “Drive” is still the band’s most popular song by a long-shot with over 486 million Spotify streams. The next closest is “Wish You Were Here” with 207 million.

In the end, Incubus has become one of the more fascinating bands to emerge from the late 90s, but I wouldn’t have predicted them to be one of the longest-lasting at the time. It’s a testament to them finding their sound. When I think of all the bands that were playing on my CD deck back in that time period, they might have been a surprise pick to continue to be so vital in the 2020s. It’s an impressive feat for any band, let alone one that started their career at the tail end of a short-lived genre of pop-metal fusion. I guess that’s why on a fresh listen of Make Yourself; it actually seems like the breadcrumbs were there all along that this wouldn’t be a band lost to the pigeonhole of stylized rap metal.

Now pardon me while I burst into flames.