Three years after he left the band, guitarist Wes Borland is back with Limp Bizkit and working on the group’s next album.
Beginning Monday morning (August 16), visitors to the homepage of Limp Bizkit’s official site were immediately confronted by a photo collage showing Borland in a studio with his former bandmates. Under the images, the caption reads: “August Thirteenth Two Thousand and Four.” Meanwhile, on Fred Durst’s blog the frontman himself authenticates what had been rumored for the past month in a post dated Saturday that read, “Well, now the Limp Bizkit fans know about Wes. Pretty dope.”
Limp Bizkit’s label, Interscope Records, however, has yet to make an announcement about the lineup change.
Borland’s return pushes his former replacement, Mike Smith, out of the lineup, a move about which Durst has no regrets. “We are very content with Mike being gone,” Durst told the Limp Bizkit fan site, www.thearmpit.net, in an interview posted Sunday. “We are the type of people that stay true to our family and our instincts and at any moment will act on intuition as a whole. Mike wasn’t the guy. We had fun playing with him, but always knew, in the back of our minds, that he wasn’t where we needed him to be mentally. On that note, you can assume that the sh- we are writing now is f–ing powerful and very emotionally laced with reality…”
When Smith joined Limp Bizkit in April 2003, Durst deemed their chemistry “dope.” So dope, in fact, that he shelved the songs written since Borland’s departure, some of which featured the guitar work of Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and Korn’s Head, and began anew.
Borland had left the band in October 2001, burdened by the fear that he was selling out.
As far as progress on Bizkit’s follow-up to last year’s Results May Vary, the band will not drop its fifth album in February, as Durst had previously announced. Rather, there’s no telling when the songs, which he said had been written over the last couple of months, will see the light of day.
“Completion isn’t on the radar,” Durst said in the interview. “We do not work that way. We are being driven at mach speed by our passion and any people or persons who cannot comprehend that will be left in the cold.”
It also doesn’t look like the band will be touring this year, as Durst had claimed three months ago. Instead, according to the interview, Limp Bizkit’s tour plans have taken a backseat to the album’s completion.
Limp Bizkit’s greatest-hits album, which includes three new songs and was originally slated for release this year, is now expected to be released in 2005.