Fever 333 Is the New Rage Against the Machine

That's right. It's Travis Barker back in action baby. ​And he's back with a plan up his sleeve. A new wave of rap-rock is rising and it’s far removed from the boorish, white-washed strain that dogged the genre’s turn-of-the-millennium heyday led by acts like Limp Bizkit. Hyro the Hero, a black artist from Houston, spent 11 weeks on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Songs chart in late 2018 with “Bullet,” a cry against police brutality.

But no act is better capitalizing on this trend than Los Angeles-based FEVER 333, whose incendiary single “Made an America” recently spent 20 consecutive weeks on Mainstream Rock Songs and earned a Grammy nomination for best rock performance. The song’s lyrics attack state-sanctioned violence (“Cop cars, true killers and they still at large”), and its video shows frontman (and director) Jason Aalon Butler forced into shackled labor and a minstrel-like song and dance while a white audience looks on.

Billboard tells us, the 3's in the band’s name represent C, the third letter in the alphabet, and stand for community, charity and change. Powerful.

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​FEVER 333 formed in early 2017 after a chance encounter between Butler and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, who is in the photo at the top. Travis has worked with rappers like Juice WRLD and Kid Cudi. So he's not totally off the radar, just playing the drums for not Blink 182.

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After Butler’s old band broke up, he was selling vegan cookies in an upscale Calabasas, Calif., supermarket to support himself and his pregnant wife. Amazing. These cookies should be sold on their merchandise section, now I'm kind of pissed. Anyways, Barker, who recognized him from seeing his band play, struck up a conversation. “We were talking about Bad Brains, Rage Against the Machine, what was missing from rock music, we should create something. ”

​After adding guitarist Stephen Harrison and drummer Aric Improta, FEVER 333 signed with Roadrunner Records, who has also signed Angel Du$t  and enlisted Barker and John Feldmann (5 Seconds of Summer, Underoath) for songwriting and production assists. Its 2018 debut single, “Walking in My Shoes,” spent 19 weeks on Mainstream Rock Songs, peaking at No. 8. “Made an America” followed, helping the band’s first album, Strength in Numb333rs, enter at No. 4 on the Heatseekers Albums chart in February.

​Barker believes that groups like FEVER 333 are “creating a new genre of really heavy, aggressive music influenced by rap.”

And Butler feels, “If guitar-based music is going to survive, it has to evolve. There’s this weird backlash in a lot of purist rock, people who feel as though it shouldn’t go any further, and that’s the most dangerous thing you can do in any form of art.”

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