RETURN OF THE HERETICS
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, We Are Not Your Kind – 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
