Metal …can go in a million different directions!”
The new Slipknot album is their most eclectic to date – with experimentation amid the fury. Guitarists Jim Root and Mick Thomson reveal all...
im Root puts it very simply. “We’re not just playing metal songs,” the guitarist says of the new Slipknot album. “There’s so much more going on. There’s orchestration, melodic vocals and screaming, piano and samples and all these layers and music styles.”
The End, So Far may not be Slipknot’s most accessible album, but it’s arguably their most eclectic, with ambient, effect-laden sounds colliding with chuggy, downtuned riffs, and tempos reeling from sluggish to torrential, often in the same song. This album, like its predecessor, 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind, is a schizophrenic hybrid of raging riffs, pop hooks, rhythmic variation and atmospheric interludes.
Many songs have the aggression and intensity of Slipknot classics such as Pyschosocial, People = Sh*t and Duality. However, the new album opens with Adderall, a melancholy, cinematic cut redolent of Radiohead and Trent Reznor. Elsewhere, Medicine For The Dead blends industrial noises into a melange of evocative arpeggios, clanking xylophones and palm-muted guitar chugs, while De Sade intertwines militaristic beats, a honey-sweet chorus and glistening guitar shards with shreddy leads.
The End, So Far was a challenging album to make, not least because Root, one of the band’s principal songwriters, was struggling with his mental health. “When the pandemic happened, I was home alone,” he recalls. “I got depressed. Guitars were depressing me. Everything was depressing me. Previously the guitar was an outlet for me to escape stuff, but this time it just reminded me of all the things that I wasn’t able to do because of Covid. So, this positive force in my life turned into this negative thing, which would’ve been absolutely f*cking horrifying if I hadn’t been able to pull myself out of it. But now I pick up a guitar and I’m like, ‘What would I do without this?’”
The band’s other guitarist, Mick Thomson, spent the downtime during quarantine doing what he loves best - modding. “I played a bunch for sure, but my mental getaway comes from fixing sh*t and modifying stuff,” he says. “It’s always therapeutic for me to be doing something with guitars. I’ve got pedals all over my dining room table. There’s guitars all over the floor. I just work on sh*t and experiment and play. I’m always putting pickups in something or swapping out a bridge, just messing with stuff, adjusting the action and the intonation. And as soon as I’m done working on something, I’ll plug in and play with it for hours.”
The End, So Far was co-produced by the band with Joe Barresi, who mixed the last two Slipknot albums. And this time around there was more writing input from percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan and bassist Allesandro ‘Alex’ Venturella.
In this expansive interview, Jim Root and Mick Thomson discuss the making of The End, So Far – the setbacks, the wild gear experiments, the whammy-bar high jinks and much more...
SOUND
Jim: We’re still trying to evolve as a band, and I’m trying to evolve as a songwriter. Our sound comes in part from constantly changing up the formula. I just wish some of these songs on this new record had the chance to evolve a little bit more. Now that we’ve been away from the recording process for a few months, I’m like, ‘Sh*t, man, I have such a better idea now for that part. I wish I could re-record that thing.’ Or: ‘I have this riff that I think would fit better in that section.’ And that’s why when we play live, I’ll improvise or add things into the songs.
Mick: There’s all this talk about the vision for this record, but there’s never a plan. Even if you think you know what’s going on, unexpected things always happen. And you can overthink things until you don’t know what you just did is any good. This album is looser and darker, but is it better? That’s up to anyone’s perception on any given day. There’s days when I love a song and then another day I hate it. But that’s what’s cool about what we do. With this album I don’t think we intentionally did anything to p*ss anyone off. But I know some people are gonna hate it, and I don’t give a sh*t about what they have to say on the Internet about how much I suck!
SONGWRITING
Mick: A lot of it is taking a part and duct-taping it onto some other part. We’re always dealing with multiple parts that come from totally different directions. That’s just Slipknot. Something might start with a part someone demoed with [software] EZ Drummer. Another thing could come from riffs that were three years old that we jammed on. Everything filters through the band and gets rebuilt and constructed. But wherever it started, and whatever it goes through, it always turns into a Slipknot song.
Jim: I was majorly involved in the writing of Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses and All Hope Is Gone. I wrote most of .5: The Gray Chapter and We Are Not Your Kind. With this record my contribution was minimal. Mostly, I helped shape and structure songs in the studio. It’s a good thing we had Alex [Venturella] picking up some of the slack along with Clown, who’s becoming a lot more involved in song arranging. But when I first heard a lot of the arrangements, I was kind of freaked out. I thought, ‘Oh f*ck, this doesn’t sound like Slipknot to me. We’ve got a lot of work to do.’ What I heard was the symptom of having somebody that isn’t in our age group and wasn’t influenced by the same music. Alex was a Slipknot fan so he sounds like somebody that was influenced by Slipknot trying to write for Slipknot. But he is an amazing schooled musician and he had some good ideas, so we Frankensteined a couple of different parts between me, Alex and Clown, and things started to take shape. A lot of my arrangements were things I had been trying to do on my own, maybe for a solo album. There was one idea I had [for the track Acidic] that was really bluesy and I experimented with key
“THIS IS THE FIRST TIME EVER ON A RECORD THAT I DIDN’T HAVE ONE GUITAR SOUND AS MY
ATTACK TONE” MICK THOMSON
changes, which I don’t normally do. And I found myself going back to playing a lot of speed metal and thrash metal riffs, and we recorded a lot of those. I handed the hard drives to our engineer and Clown and I said, ‘Here’s some stuff. See if you can do anything with these.’ So it was a huge group effort.
RECORDING
Jim: We were flying by the seat of our pants! We had zero time for pre-production and it was like we were adding to this meal we were making as we were eating it. No one had rehearsed together. If we were gonna rewrite parts of the demos it was gonna have to happen right there on the spot as we were recording it. It wasn’t my favourite way to make a record, but we had no choice – we had a budget and a schedule we had to stick to. But we tend to work well under pressure and we got a great record out of it.
Mick: It was really fun to experiment in the studio this time. We’d have something and then I’d throw a bunch of other different amps up and go, ‘Okay, let’s try this.’ I would double a riff but then change it a little. Next thing I knew, that doubled riff was the main part with a totally different amp sound and my normal tone had disappeared. It was just a bizarro process. It was almost a backwards record from the way we’ve worked before.
INFLUENCES
Jim: It sounds like it’s all over the place because our influences come from all over the place and we’ve evolved to the point where we can get that across in the songs. This band is such a cornucopia of different personalities and musical styles. Me and Mick are basically self-taught metal dudes. Corey [Taylor] can sing anything. Alex is schooled in music, Clown came from a more indie rock world, and everyone else is very artistic in their own way and they bring their own approach to the songs as well.
Mick: It shouldn’t be too easy to digest or even categorize. When we did Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses, I was listening to a burn of rough [mixes] in my car in Des Moines. The guys in the band Cephalic Carnage were playing in Des Moines that night, so I was playing the songs for one of the guys in the band and he was like, ‘This is just so different. What is it? It’s metal, but it’s not metal. How do you define it?’ And I said, ‘Stop trying to f*cking nail it to a wall as something and just enjoy it as music!’ You don’t have to put yourself in a narrow type of pigeonhole, and that’s what I love about metal more than a lot of other music. You can draw from a lot more places. Punk always sounds like punk, but metal can go in a million different directions.
LEADS
Jim: I have different phases of guitar playing that I go through. There’s the woodshedding phase where your muscle memory is really great around the fretboard. And then you have your writing mode. For me, that’s when I throw all the woodshedding and muscle memory out the window and focus on the songs and the riffs. And that’s the phase I was in when we were recording. I’m kind of bummed because I was really out of practice when we tracked the record. I was insecure about playing the guitar and doing the solos. I was just like, ‘Sh*t, why now?’ If we had time, I’d like to go back and re-approach some of the solos.
Mick: We didn’t write any of the solos. If there were any bigger, more involved leads, I probably would have sat down,
felt it out, built it and taken it someplace instead of recording a bunch of random, sporadic sh*t that came out of my brain once that afternoon and now has to stand the test of time. I bought a couple of Jackson Dinky guitars with whammies on Reverb.com and brought them into the studio. I even got a Jackson sustainer, so I went nuts with the whammy bar on a bunch of spots ’cause I was having fun. I’ve only played hardtails ever since we started recording. I literally drove to Simi Valley to pick up these guitars and then used them to record my solos.
PRODUCTION
Mick: The fact that Joe [Barresi] engineered the Kyuss records I always loved so much sold me on him. Joe’s history with tones is unreal. And he has a certain openness to trying different things, which I loved. He got me to use a bunch of different passive pickups with great effect on a bunch of spots. So that’s something I’ve reopened my mind to after 20 years. I play passives and stuff at home, but I wouldn’t even consider taking a passive pickup guitar to go play metal in somebody’s basement. But dialing that back a bit was fun because it forced me to really dig in. I’ve got a pretty heavy right hand anyway, so it’s not much work for me to dig in more to get more out of those strings.
Jim: Joe is extremely knowledgeable about sounds. F*ck, listen to Tool [whose albums Barresi has engineered]. He knows how to get the best out of everyone. Working with him has made me go to my live rig, and me and my tech are reworking the sounds on my amps now. I’m gonna see if EMG can make me a passive style of pickup, like an HZ, which would have a different vibe from the compressed pickups I’m using right now. I’d like to dive a little deeper into that world and go back to the roots of everything – using an overdrive pedal to get that extra juice out of the amp instead of jamming the preamp gain.
“I THOUGHT, ‘OH, F*** — THIS DOESN’T SOUND LIKE SLIPKNOT. WE'VE GOT A LOT OF WORK TO DO”
JIM ROOT
GEAR
Mick: I had so much fun experimenting with all the gear. It’s more in your mind than in the pedals, but there are all these soundscapes that you can create in all these different ways. This is the first time ever on a record that I didn’t have one guitar sound as my attack tone. And I had a different amp on every song – multiple amps on every song. And then there were all these other layers; we played with radically different amp combos. Joe’s got a bunch of stuff, which is like a toy chest. And I’ve got lots of my own stuff, too. The funnest thing was putting together non-metal things – different combinations that wouldn’t necessarily be your first choice for a metal tone – and then just playing the living sh*t out of them. There were times when I’d be playing heavy parts with a passive pickup guitar with a fairly low output into a Marshall 800 with an overdrive. I’d be picking real hard and it sounds like I have tons of gain on there but it felt damn near clean in my hands picking it. You have to beat the living sh*t out of it, and a lot of that translated in a great way. There’s a lot of organic-ness all over the record that wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t experimented with Joe. It made everything so much more fun.