How Deijuvhs is breaking the nu-metal mould

While 12,500 metalheads were bouncing around like mad dogs to Limp Bizkit at the capital’s OVO Arena Wembley two weekends ago, Deijuvhs (pronounced day-you-V-H-S) was having quite the relaxing, lazy Sunday. Although he counts Fred Durst as one of his buddies – having been personally invited to open their Gunnersbury Park knees-up in 2023 – the east Londoner spent his day in search of a good night’s sleep and a digital detox.

“I’m going to do it more [often], at least once a week,” he promises, speaking to Kerrang! the following afternoon. “Too much anxiety with the phones and that… usually, my house is the gang HQ, where the parties happen. So I could have a nice sleep, I slept at my bredrin’s house instead, and I was like ‘Ah, fuck it, let’s leave my phone.’”

When you consider how busy Deijuvhs has been keeping, it’s easy to understand why he might want some breathing space. Working in tandem with his longtime producer Mattu, a river of singles has been pouring out of the studio in the past few years, leading up to his fourth mixtape Cemetery Scum.

LOTUS – which used to be called Sex, he reveals – almost recontextualises Deftones’ My Own Summer (Shove It) in 2025 – before descending into drum’n’bass pandemonium. Hellspawn confirms his golden touch with anything adjacent to nu-metal, complete with grizzly record scratches. How about some spooky trap? Look no further than Neo Massacre. Yet again, Deijuvhs continues to fuse his far-reaching tastes under one musical umbrella – and he makes it feel like light work.

“When I make music, I usually cross-reference so many different genres – it’s quite easy for me,” he grins. “It’s harder for me to make one genre, it’s easier for me to mix genres together… go with the flow, add this here, add this there. You don’t want to make anything too boring, you know what I mean?”

With Cemetery Scum marking his fourth mixtape, the vision was clear from the outset, as he succinctly explains. “I wanted it to [sound] like a ’90s movie, Blade or Queen Of The Damned. I’d tell my producer, ‘Watch this scene from Queen Of The Damned, and let’s make a song that sounds like that. I like those movies aesthetically, it’s all that nu-metally shit. It looks cool as shit. The colour correction, it’s done really well.”

It’s clear that Deijuvhs’ affiliation with nu-metal will always form a core part of his style. On Cemetery Scum, however, he’s seeking to push those parameters to their limit. “With LOTUS, I didn’t want to make just a nu-metal song,” he reflects. “I didn’t even do any UK rap flows. I wanted a dancey element at the end, so we decided to put a little drum’n’bass [section], but still with a nu-metal flavour to it.”

Haunting dark-pop cut Scary Sight transports us straight back to the 2010s, albeit with an underbelly of chunky riffage. “We were listening to Ke$ha, ‘Apple bottom jeans…’ [Flo Rida and T-Pain’s Low], all of that weird, dancey 2012 pop music. Then we were listening to Marilyn Manson as well, and obviously some nu-metal. Ke$ha with a bit of Manson in it – that’s how Scary Sight came about.”

The elephant in the room, however, is Hellspawn, where Deij screeches ‘Break! Stuff!’ over a merciless breakdown, shouting out the genre’s definitive number. “I referenced it because of that Limp Bizkit show,” he explains. “It was all over the gaff, but the main feel of the song is to just do what you want to do in life. Don’t settle for anything less.”

In amongst all the carnage and fury, Cemetery Scum showcases arguably Deijuvhs’ most vulnerable work to date. Comatose and the sombre Devil May Cry book-end the mixtape detailing his struggles with drug use and mental health (‘Living doesn’t mean you’re alive… Being sober doesn’t ease the pain’). “A lot of the subject matter is quite dark,” he reflects.

“Everyone’s got mental health issues… I talk about drugs a lot, but obviously not glamorising it so much, [because] it’s real stuff innit. You do drugs recreationally, but there’s a level where it’s not recreational. It’s a bit controlling, you know what I mean?

“Them songs are easier to write than all that fucking rapping shit,” he continues, describing A7X’s A Little Piece Of Heaven as his all-time favourite ballad. “I was listening to the mixtape, and it was way too aggressive. Obviously, I love metal, but I’m getting kind of old, and my ears are starting to hurt more. I was like, ‘Rah, can we just chill this mixtape out a bit and make something in the major chords, or something a bit happier?’ I need a bit of time to simmer down. I love a little ballad… a 10-minute song, hell yeah. That is the dream.”

Although he’s given some slight thoughts to the setlist for his June UK and European headline tour (it looks like Scumbag Anthem and Freakazoid are here to stay), the long-term future doesn’t bother Deijuvhs too much. Nor does the past, and reflecting on a discography that already spans more genres than some career artists would ever achieve. “My brain works differently,” he shrugs.

Though he’s shifting some of his focus to another project titled VIIZERO7, new material continues to trickle along in the background (“I’ve got a studio session for Deijuvhs tomorrow,” he reassures us), with his mindset clearer. “I think I lost a bit of my way in the past year, but I’ve come back,” he concludes. “DIY stuff, doing everything myself – like you’re supposed to do as a punk rocker. In the long-term, it’s so much more enjoyable. The punk rock ethos has been re-ignited in my chest.”

Deijuvhs’ new mixtape Cemetery Scum is due out March 28 via 23 Recordings.

Read this next:

• Avenged Sevenfold: “We want to make a roadmap to show artists that there’s a better way”
• 10 lesser known Korn songs that everyone needs to hear
• Limp Bizkit: How Significant Other saw the nu-metal anti-heroes take over the world