Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler admitted that he’s a big nu-metal fan, singling out Fear Factory as one band he was particularly drawn to when working on his solo debut album.

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Although frequently disparaged by heavy metal traditionalists, the late ’90s/early ’00s movement did a lot of heavy lifting to extend the genre’s relevancy for a few more generations, in addition to birthing some uniquely colorful and eclectic bands. Moreover, those purists’ attempts to discredit the style come off as silly given that a person who’s considered to be among the godfathers of heavy metal is a great fan, and, as Geezer admits to Knotfest in a new interview, was even directly inspired by the music that was coming out of it.

As the bassist recalls, the sheer diversity of the music coming out at that time was staggering, as it almost felt like every band had their own idea of what metal should be:

“I was really into metal back then, and it was influencing the stuff I was writing as well. It was amazing to see what new bands were coming out then. And each one had a different version of metal, if you want to call it metal. Different versions, instead of just going on and screaming into the microphone and everything sounding the same. Really good, different bands coming out. Slipknot being one of them, obviously. It was great.”

According to the bassist, Fear Factory in particular was a big one for him around the time he was working on his 1995 solo debut “Plastic Planet”:

“I really liked Fear Factory at the time and I’d been writing all this stuff that was too heavy for Sabbath or Ozzy. Pedro [Howse, guitarist], my nephew, had this band called Crazy Angel, who were like an ultra-thrash band. So when me and him got writing together it came out ultra-heavy, and I wasn’t restricted to what lyrics I was going to write about. A lot of it is about science fiction – a bit like what’s going on now with the AI stuff and everything.”

Speaking of influences, Geezer’s truly seem to come from everywhere. He recently singled out The Beatles as one of his greatest musical inspirations, because they were the first British rock band who managed to sound radically different from their US colleagues:

“When The Beatles came along, they had a completely original sound. And they were all literally from Liverpool, which is 90 miles from where we were born. And it just like gave us some hope that British musicians could actually become successful. And as soon as The Beatles were successful, then you had The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks, The Who, Herman’s Hermits, a whole explosion of British pop music.”