Incubus is a quintet Los Angeles led by frontman and vocalist Brandon Boyd that plays a hybrid of hard-rock riffs, hip-hop beats, funk bass lines and post-metal crooning. Rather than taking on their contemporaries Limp Bizkit and Korn, they hark back to the origins of the crossover, to Faith No More, to Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against The Machine and Primus. The EP Fungus Amongus (Epic, 1995) collects unreleased material from their early years. Science (Immortal, 1997) was the showcase for their musical mastery and their brutal hyper-fusion (Magic Medicine, Summer Romance, Nebula). There was nothing on the album that had not been done before, but one could sense a deep feeling of honesty and a sincere spleen.

The much more accessible Make Yourself (Epic, 1999) is remarkably effective in stealing stereotypes of grunge and pop and manufacturing catchy and atmospheric songs like Privilege and Make Yourself. The band is careful not to exaggerate in either direction: the Nirvana-esque monster-riff of Nowhere Fast lasts only a few seconds, soon overrun by a power-ballad (with traces of Steely Dan-esque jazz); The Warmth loosens the tension with a Doors-ian organ and related suspense; Stellar's middle section is straight out of a Police album. Towards the end the band displays whatever originality it has gotten: Drive (their best-seller) is a cute country-rocker in the vein of Crosby Stills & Nash; the guitar plays "coitus interruptus" in Clean, supported by a funky bass; Battlestar Scralatchtica toys with toasting, scratching and hip-hop beats. Incubus' grunge is a music of brains, not muscles.

Wish You Were Here and Blood On The Ground continue the process of re-alignment to the mainstream on Morning View (Epic, 2001), although the album displays a sonic elegance and eclectic dynamics that virtually reinvents the art of heavy-metal. Nice To Know You, Have You Ever and Under My Umbrella are replete with stereotypes but subvert them with every successive note. The experiment fails because of an excess of "softness" (11 am and Mexico), but is nonetheless unusual.

A Crow Left Of The Murder (Epic, 2004) is simply an album of generically bombastic hard-rock (Megalomaniac).

By the time of Light Grenades (Sony, 2006), Incubus had become synonym with "mainstream metal". The singalong Diamonds and Coal, the ballad Earth to Bella and the occasional burst of violence (Anna Molly) defined the stereotype of what the masses expected from mainstream metal.

If Not Now, When (2011) contains Adolescents and little else to commend the new power-pop course.