'Our bandmate. Our heartbeat.' Limp Bizkit bassist Sam Rivers dies at 48

Sam Rivers, a founding member and bassist for the nu metal band Limp Bizkit, died on Saturday at the age of 48, his bandmates said in a social media post.

"Today we lost our brother. Our bandmate. Our heartbeat," lead singer Fred Durst, guitarist Wes Borland, drummer John Otto and turntable DJ Lethal wrote in a tribute posted on Instagram Saturday evening.

"Sam Rivers wasn’t just our bass player — he was pure magic. The pulse beneath every song, the calm in the chaos, the soul in the sound," the message read.

"From the first note we ever played together, Sam brought a light and a rhythm that could never be replaced. His talent was effortless, his presence unforgettable, his heart enormous."

Limp Bizkit was set to begin its seven-city Gringo Papi tour of Latin America on Nov. 29.

It was unclear at the time of publication if the band would continue the tour without Rivers.

"You will live on through your music and the lives you helped save with your music, charity work and friendships," DJ Lethal, a band member whose real name is Leor Dimant, said in a comment on the post.

He asked that fans respect Rivers's family's privacy but to "give Sam his flowers and play Sam Rivers baselines all day!"

Limp Bizkit, described as a nu metal band that fused rap and rock, formed in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1994.

It had its breakthrough five years later with the release of its second album Significant Other and smash hit lead single Nookie.

The album spent its first four weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart and was eventually certified 7x Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, after selling more than seven million copies.

The band scored Grammy nominations for Best Rock Album and Best Hard Rock Performance, for Nookie, at the 42nd Grammy Awards in 2000.

Follow-up album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water, further sealed the band's mainstream success when it also debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart in Oct. 2000.

Limp Bizkit released its sixth and most recent studio album, Still Sucks, in 2021.

The band did not provide details about Rivers's cause of death.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Rivers left the band in 2015 after being diagnosed with liver disease, but returned to the stage following a liver transplant in 2018.

Rivers said that he got the disease from "excessive drinking."

"I had to leave Limp Bizkit in 2015 because I felt so horrible, and a few months after that I realized I had to change everything because I had really bad liver disease,” Variety reported him telling told author Jon Wiederhorn in an interview for the 2020 book Raising Hell: Backstage Tales from the Lives of Metal Legends.

“I quit drinking and did everything the doctors told me. I got treatment for the alcohol and got a liver transplant, which was a perfect match," he said.

Rivers, who was born in Jacksonville on Sept. 2, 1977, last performed with Limp Bizkit on stage at the Leeds Festival, in Leeds, England and the Reading Festival, in Reading, England, in late August.

He shared a video on his Instagram account at the time saying it was "such a beautiful experience" to perform at Reading.

Limp Bizkit's last Canadian show was on April 26, when they played Toronto's Rogers Centre, opening for Metallica on their M72 world tour.

Rivers's fellow band members remembered him Saturday as "a once-in-a-lifetime kind of human" and said his "spirit will live forever in every groove, every stage, every memory."

"We shared so many moments — wild ones, quiet ones, beautiful ones — and every one of them meant more because Sam was there," his bandmates wrote.

"Rest easy, brother. Your music never ends," their statement concluded.