COVER STORY: SLIPKNOT

After what feels like a solid 666 years in hibernation, nu‑metal hellions Slipknot are back – bigger, better, and more beautifully brutal than ever.

AFTER WHAT FEELS LIKE A SOLID 666 YEARS IN HIBERNATION, NU-METAL HELLIONS SLIPKNOT ARE BACK – BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE BEAUTIFULLY BRUTAL THAN EVER. AUSTRALIAN GUITAR GOES HEAD-TO-HEAD WITH AXEMEN JIM ROOT AND MICK THOMSON TO VIBE ON THE UNUSUALLY POSITIVE STORY BEHIND WEARENOT YOURKIND, AND WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN THE MASKED MARAUDERS MAKE THE TREK DOWN UNDER THIS OCTOBER.

Despite their reign as one of the biggest names in guitar music, Slipknot have never really cracked the mainstream. They’re a household name by all means, just not one necessarily murmured with positive inclinations. With piercing and polarising anthems like “Spit It Out”, “People = Shit” and “Pulse Of The Maggots” (the latter named for their fiercely dutiful fanbase), the faceless nonet have carved an infrangible rep as a metaphorical megaphone for the underdogs; those aforementioned maggots cling on to Slipknot’s punishing catharsis with a fervour unrivalled, and as such, have catapulted the Iowa tribe to the ranks of festival headliners and bonafide icons.

It’s not wholly unintentional that Slipknot are still largely stamped as the ‘outsiders’ of heavy music, either. Uncaring to water down their music for the masses (no matter the sizeable dollar signs begging them to), they’ve remained intransigently barbarous; unsettling; hysterical. And they don’t give one gram of a f*** if you sneer at a quip of their name or gag at their garish accoutrement – they aren’t for you. Such is defiantly emboldened by their new album, WeAreNot

YourKind – the sixth in total, and first in an achingly long five years. From the tearing mile-a-second thrash solos on “Solway Firth”, to the jarring industrial prangs that sizzle and snap on “Spiders”, the 14-tracker is a polychromatic journey through more sonic influences – many of which are truly unpredictable – than Slipknot have ever embodied. The intention is to rupture the maggots’ grasp of what they know Slipknot to “sound like” six albums in; to rip them from their comfort zones like band-aids off a wound – a truly ambitious task when you look at how idiosyncratic the discography is to begin with.

Naturally, to take their listeners out of their comfort zones, the band had to acknowledge, analyse, and set fire to their own.

“I think that was the most important thing for us to do in evolving our sound,” affirms longstanding shredder, Jim Root. “That track ‘Spiders’ is way outside of my comfort zone. I don’t know if it actually sounds like it, but I’d almost compare it to “Ashes To Ashes”-era David Bowie, or some kind of ‘80s pop music – it’s very unlike the grind riffs and blast beats we always do, that’s for sure. And when you’re put outside of the box like that as a guitar player, it makes you really think and push yourself to do things you wouldn’t normally do, or things you would only do if you’re sitting around in your bedroom, jamming.”

Of course, the core ethos of Slipknot has always been to challenge the conjectural traditions of heavy music. Their self-titled debut – which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary – turned heads by the million upon its release; chopped and twisted samples, gnawing and distorted guitars making it an unparalleled headturner in a burgeoning nu-metal scene. Percussionist (and unofficial director of the band) Shaun ‘Clown’ Crahan, is credited for much of their primordial eccentricity – and as Root’s fellow fretboard warrior Mick Thomson explains, the chilling caprice of ‘Clown World’ has remained a pivotal force in Slipknot’s evolution.

“[Clown will] be working on crazy stuff all the time,” he says, noting that collaborations with Crahan are fruitful in driving him

creatively as a guitarist. “When you get deep into that Clown World weirdness, that’s going to send you in a different direction than if you were sitting there by yourself, playing thrash and metal type riffs. You play to the vibe that you’re given.”

Consequently, if there’s anyone holding Slipknot back from teetering over the edge of insanity, it’s Slipknot themselves. “There aren’t any limits on the music we write,” Thomson continues, “But there are kind of limits on what you would want to put on your records, y’know? If we just put every single thing we ever came up with on our record, people wouldn’t know what the f*** to do with it! Because we’re all musicians! We all love playing all sorts of different stuff. But y’know, we couldn’t do a slow blues jam – even though we would have a tonne of fun playing one. The stuff that we’ve put on this one is… It lives in our world. It’s a little out-there, but it still sounds like us.”

So, we’ve established that come its August 9th release date, We Are Not Your Kind will undoubtedly throw Slipknot devotees through a loop. It’s worth noting, however, that none of its peculiarities are fundamentally new for the band. On the surface, they’ve teased hints of derangement in album openers and interludes spanning the whole gamut, from the unnerving wails and tweaked-out Corey Hurst sample on Slipknot opener “742617000027”, to the eerie blips of glitched laughter on

GrayChapter lull “Be Prepared For Hell”. LP6 merely pries the wound open for more Clown World weirdness to bleed out; but tap into their archives, and you’ll find swathes of musical lunacy hoarding dust, just waiting for some savvy hacker to leak it and inflict widespread sonic trauma.

“We’ve got so much of this weird shit going back 20 years that just never made it onto the records,” Thomson explains. “People are talking about how [songs like ‘Spiders’] are new things for us, but it’s not new, it’s just that people are getting to hear it for it for the first time. On the last record [2014’s .5:The

GrayChapter], a lot of our live segues between songs were stuff that Clown had worked on in the studio, just doing crazy noise. There’s different shit I’ve played on things in Clown World that aren’t the guitar – in fact, it’s fun to not play the guitar; it’s fun to grab something else and f*** around with it, y’know?”

Though we’ve caught both Thomson and Root at a markedly unpleasant time – they’re at a festival in Europe where rain is bucketing down, schedules are hectic, and a shoddy phone line almost snips Root out of the picture altogether – there’s a palpable sense of elation in their voices whenever the topic shifts to We Are Not Your Kind. Though its pre-release has been marred slightly by legal dramas and death, the record’s studio sessions were amongst Slipknot’s most buoyant. “I was really happy with the way we recorded [ WeAreNot

YourKind],” Thomson raves. “It was the most efficient we’ve ever been. Everything was smooth and there was no fighting between us – everything was just really f***ing pleasant, and I think the end result shows that. I felt better about this entire recording process than I did about the previous one, if I’m being honest. I think we’re all just in a really good spot at the moment.

WE’RE ALL PRETTY DIFFERENT AND WE’RE ALL IN DIFFERENT PLACES IN OUR LIVES, AND ALL OF THAT ENDS UP COMING OUT SUBCONSCIOUSLY IN WHAT YOU CREATE... – MICK THOMSON

And now that we’ve started touring, our heads are in a really good place and everyone feels pretty positive.”

As tends to be the case when you’ve got nine people hashing away on a project, brighter spirits all around led to an amplified creative chemistry in Slipknot.

“We had a lot more freedom this time,” Thomson says. “There was a lot more work between different people and a lot more collaborating together as a band. It always takes a bunch of people to put a stamp on things and make it sound like us in the end, but it always does end up sounding like us because you can’t help but be yourself, y’know? When I play something, it’s going to sound like the way I play it – maybe not to everybody on Earth, but to the people who know me, they’re going to be like, ‘Ah yeah, that’s a Mick thing.’

“We’re all pretty different and we’re all in different places in our lives, and all of that ends up coming out subconsciously in what you create. You’re not consciously thinking, ‘I’m super pissed off, so I’m going to write a pissed-off guitar riff,’ but that shit has a way of wriggling itself out. I think every one of our records is a snapshot of the sort of mentality we’re in at any given point – and I think this record captures that pretty well.”

“I don’t know if there’s any formula,” Root says of Slipknot’s collective writing process, “You just kind of see what happens when you’re building [a song]. When you’re tracking in the studio, you just keep throwing layers down until you have so many layers that you don’t know what’s in front of you – then you start to subtract the layers until you’re only left with what’s absolutely vital to the song. And those final layers could sound completely different to what you had when you started working on them.”

Ultimately, the principal catalyst for We Are Not Your Kind being such an extraordinary record for Slipknot is that, after almost 25 years of bandom, they decided to forgo their usual blueprint for making an album – which, in years prior, would see them schedule long, lonesome bouts of studio time, hole up together and smash it all out in a months-long eruption of consistent gumption. It was 2016 when Root and Crahan decided to shift the tides, establishing an archetype where members could step in and out of the process at will, different pairings of Slipknot members chipping away on the album for a weighty three years before its concept was settled on.

By stripping themselves of a timeline, the band were able to focus less on We Are Not Your Kind as a conditional destination, and more on their journey to it – which, by proxy, led to new colours seeping onto their palate.

“When you start adding new things,” Thomson explains, “The older things that you’re used to relying on, the bedrocks of your playing, they start to fade away, and new ideas come to the surface. That was a really great thing about this record: we had a lot of different sessions in the studio over a couple-year period, as opposed to getting thrown into a room and being told, ‘Hurry up and write a bunch of songs, you’re tracking in a month!’ When you’re under the gun and doing shit on a deadline, you’re not letting your songs evolve – you’re not letting them breathe and take on a life of their own.

“This time, we had so much more time and experience with the songs. I mean, we played every track that’s on the record… Probably atleast 100 times before they were committed to tape. There’s a lot of work and a lot of familiarisation that happens in that process – it helps you to see more objectively, so you can go, ‘Yeah, we could trim some fat here,’ or, ‘Maybe this is a little too stark and needs something uplifting – maybe Sid’s got an idea!’ We had a much clearer view of things, and that was something I really liked; there was no real pressure to bang, bang, bang stuff out – we knew what we wanted to do and we knew how we wanted to do it, and that allowed us to experiment a lot more.”

Experimentation was also key to the guitarsenal Thomson and Root brandished on We Are Not Your Kind. Root’s go-to axe was his signature Fender Jazzmaster, shaken up with new custom-built, prototype-model EMG pickups.

In addition to “a shittonne of pedals” – the finer details of which are, naturally, top secret – Thomson’s primary shredding setup consisted of his new signature model Jackson Soloist (a sourlooking metallic green model, to be precise) decked out with a passive Seymour Duncan P-90 pickup, perma-tuned to drop D and run through a nondescript fuzz pedal into a reissue of Fender’s classic ’65 Super Reverb amp. “You would never expect to see that amp miced up on a Slipknot record,” he admits, “But it turned out really good! It added some cool fuzzy shit to everything.”

For the crunchier, more typically Slipknot-aligned metal tones, Thomson relied on Obsidian and Iridium kits from Omega Ampworks – his cabinet enhanced with a prototype version of an as-yet-unannounced signature speaker rig. Conversely, Root’s amp setup was centred around a modified Bogner head, a ‘60s-era Orange cabinet (borrowed from co-producer Greg Fidelman), and – as his designated wildcard entry – a Mesa Boogie Mark IIC++ Coliseum, which he giddily describes “a super f***ing special amp”.

“That thing is a f***ing monster,” he says happily. “It also has a really loud fan in it, which almost doubles as a built-in effect.”

For their monolithic live shows, Slipknot run on a proprietary rigging system developed by bassist Alessandro Venturella. In an effort to streamline their production and travelling needs, he, Root and Thomson all run on the same base kit, with their individual amps and pedals running through identical (though duplicated) tech setups.

“The difference is in our personal flavour,” Thomson says. “I’m playing Omega Obsidian amps, Jim’s got his Oranges, and Alex has the amps that he’s using, but our foundations are all the same, so we have a collective knowledge of our amp rigs along with our techs. That way, if there’s a problem with Jim’s rig and my guy knows more about a certain aspect of a piece of gear, he can go, ‘This is the problem here’ and immediately help with Jim or vice versa. It’s a really cool and smart way of doing it – and then you just plug in your own personal flavours.

“It also means we don’t have to carry as much f***ing gear. Instead of having three sets of specific wirelesses and backups for each of them, we only need to bring one backup for three people. Alex did a killer job on that – and my tech, Mike from Omega, helped out and did a bunch of stuff for us too. And it’s been great! We’re only five or six shows in, but I think it’s the best we’ve ever sounded live – it definitely feels like it’s the best we’ve sounded onstage. Everything is just really cohesive, and… I don’t know, I’ve been enjoying it for once! Usually I have something to complain about, but I haven’t had the privilege of getting to throw any tantrums yet. That just means we’re going to end up finding really stupid and inane shit to complain about, though.” Root: “There’s not enough green M&Ms in this football helmet!”

Thomson: “The flowers on this end table are wilted! Can we get a flower person here, now!? This is f***ing unacceptable.”

Root: “If my feng shui gets any more off, I might kill somebody.”

I GREW UP LOVING IRON MAIDEN, AND I GREW UP F***ING IDOLISING METALLICA, AND THOSE ARE THE ONLY TWO BANDS THAT WE’LL OPEN FOR. – JIM ROOT