New Korn Album Leaked Onto Net

Korn's highly anticipated (at least by millions of Korn fans) upcoming album, Untouchables, is apparently a bit too anticipated. All 15 songs off an advance copy of the album, set for a June 11 release, have been leaked onto the Internet, resulting in a flurry of file trading and disc-burning.

Advance copies were pressed sometime in early March and distributed to media representatives, but the exact date when individual songs hit the net is not known. On March 19, UK metal fan site Metal Hammer, after "[having] anonymously been sent a copy" of the new CD, printed a 14-song track listing, along with track-by-track reviews/descriptions.

As an indication of how widely Untouchables was leaked, this week the album debuted at #161 on the Gracenote Top 200, a listing of the most popular CDs played on computer CD drives while listeners are online. The last unreleased disc to accomplish that feat was Jay-Z/R. Kelly's The Best of Both Worlds, which debuted at #199 one month before its originally scheduled release date of March 26. That album was released March 19.

A spokesman for Epic Records, the label for which Korn record, said the track listing on Metal Hammer was incorrect. There are currently no plans to push up the release date of Untouchables, but the tracks on the official release will "most likely" be changed from those on the advances, according to Epic. — R Airiq Williams [March 26, 2002]