Limp Bizkit covered The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” in 2003, but judging by the response Fred Durst got from the Instagram photo he posted Thursday, the band should have covered “Who Are You” – since no one could recognize the “Break Stuff” Singer. “How is your hair THAT white?” asked one commenter after seeing Fred’s new look. In the July 28 photo, Durst, 50, sits on what appears to be a motel room’s bed. He has a shaggy mop of gray/white hair, a long mustache, and not a red cap in sight. “Thinking about you 70 [ufo emoji],” Fred captioned the pic, which is odd since he’s turning 51 on August 20. Adding to the confusion, this is the only picture on Fred’s Instagram. He wiped the account clean.
“Anyone else see a little bit of a Bon Jovi resemblance?” asked one fan in the comments. Many fans couldn’t recognize Fred. Others saw Hulk Hogan (“That’s a nice, HULKAMANIAC worthy moostaché”), Helmut Bakaitis’s character from The Matrix Reloaded (“Which matrix are you the architect of?”), Joe Dirt (“thought it was David Spade for a second”), and Edward Lewis from Pretty Woman (“Shit, I thought Richard Gere popped up from outta nowhere”). Others liked his new hair. One said, “Damn, he’s a model.” Another wrote, “Damn, silver fox.”
Fred has done some acting in the past, with roles on House and Revelations — so this new look could be for a role. Or, at 50 years of age, Fred may have decided on a change. Fred and his band have returned to the spotlight thanks, in part, to the Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage documentary on HBO. The band is also scheduled to play Lollapalooza on Saturday (July 31), hitting the Bud Light Seltzer stage after Trippie Redd and before Journey closes out the night.
With the 90s and early 2000s becoming en vogue, it would seem now would be the time for a Bizkit comeback. The band hasn’t released a new album since 2011’s Gold Cobra, and their rumored follow-up, Stampede of the Disco Elephants, has been in development hell (Fred claimed in 2017 that it’s been on “multiple torrent sites and mp3/.rar blogs” for over a year, per Metal Sucks.) The band’s guitarist, Wes Borland, recently appeared on the Drinks With Johnny podcast to explain why the album’s been delayed for over a decade.
“Fred has been consistently kind of unsatisfied with where the vision is, I guess,” Borland said, per Metal Castle. “So we’ve released singles, we did [the 2013 single] ‘Ready to Go,’ and we did another single called ‘Endless Slaughter’ that we put out [in 2014]. But [Fred]… I think that he’s just getting to the point now. We probably have 35 songs recorded instrumentally, and he’s done vocals on them and then thrown the vocals away, going, ‘F-ck this! Throw it away.’ So I think he’s finally at the point now where he’s gonna pick a set of these songs that he’s finally cool with and finish them. And we’re gonna finish a record. So, fingers crossed.”