Jim 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
