Chris Fehn walked into a Manhattan courtroom on 14 March 2019 and filed a lawsuit against the rest of Slipknot. He accused Corey Taylor and Shawn Crahan of routing band income through undisclosed limited liability companies registered in several US states, and he demanded a full forensic audit of every Slipknot entity. Four days later, the band announced through their website that he was no longer in the group. He had been their percussionist for twenty-one years. The album he had been working on was still in mixing at EastWest Studios in Hollywood, four thousand kilometres away.
That album was We Are Not Your Kind, released on 9 August 2019, and it is the only Slipknot record made by eight masked men rather than nine. The story of how a band losing a long-standing member halfway through a session ended up with their first UK number one in eighteen years, a Metacritic score of 89 and a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album is the story of this post.
Album facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Slipknot |
| Album | We Are Not Your Kind |
| Release date | 9 August 2019 |
| Label | Roadrunner Records |
| Producer(s) | Greg Fidelman with Slipknot |
| Studio(s) | EastWest Studios, Hollywood, California (November 2018 to April 2019) |
| Genre / subgenre | Nu metal, alternative metal, groove metal, with elements of electronic, industrial and progressive rock |
| Track count | 14 (standard), 15 (Japanese edition with All Out Life) |
| Total runtime | 63 minutes 29 seconds |
| Billboard 200 peak | 1 (third consecutive US number one) |
| UK Albums Chart peak | 1 (first UK number one since 2001's Iowa) |
| Other notable peaks | 1 in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Ireland, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Scotland |
| Certifications | Gold in UK (BPI), Canada, Austria, New Zealand |
| Estimated sales | 118,000 album-equivalent units first week US, 102,000 pure album sales; 31,800 units first week UK |
| Key singles | Unsainted, Solway Firth, Birth of the Cruel, Nero Forte |
Cultural context
August 2019 was a heavy year for legacy metal. Tool ended a thirteen-year silence with Fear Inoculum. Rammstein released their first record in a decade. Killswitch Engage put out Atonement. Periphery, Whitechapel and Devin Townsend's Empath all landed inside the same six-month window. For the first time since the early 2000s, mainstream rock radio was making space for guitars that did not apologise. Slipknot did not arrive into a desert.
The other backdrop was political. Corey Taylor had been on Loudwire and elsewhere through 2018 and 2019 talking openly about Donald Trump and what he called the "bigotry" of American public life, and that texture leaks into the record's title and its sigil-on-yellow cover. The album positions itself as the outsiders' outsiders, even after twenty years of platinum sales and Grammy nominations. The "you" in the title is broad on purpose.
Slipknot's own scene had shifted too. Joey Jordison, the drummer the band had fired in 2013, was still alive (he died in July 2021) but absent. Paul Gray was nine years gone. Of the original nine, only Shawn "Clown" Crahan remained from the founding lineup. We Are Not Your Kind is the moment they stopped grieving in public and started arguing about how Slipknot in their forties should sound.
The band's story up to this point
Slipknot formed in Des Moines, Iowa in 1995. Their self-titled Roadrunner debut went platinum in 2000. Iowa (2001) made them the most violent commercially viable band on the planet. Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), produced by Rick Rubin in 2004, won them their only Grammy to date (for the single "Before I Forget"). All Hope Is Gone in 2008 was their first US number one. Then bassist and primary songwriter Paul Gray died of an accidental overdose on 24 May 2010, and the band almost stopped.
They did not. They toured with substitute bassist Donnie Steele behind the drum riser, founded their own festival Knotfest in 2012, fired Jordison in December 2013, and recorded .5: The Gray Chapter in 2014 with Greg Fidelman as their first new outside producer in a decade. That album was a wake for Gray. Jay Weinberg, son of Bruce Springsteen drummer Max, took the drum stool. Alessandro Venturella took the bass.
By the time Crahan and Jim Root sat down in February 2017 to write what became We Are Not Your Kind, the band were running out of obvious things to grieve. They were also fully professional musicians in their forties, multi-millionaires several times over, with side projects, families, art shows and bourbon brands. The pressure of having to sound like a chaotic gang of dirtbags from Des Moines had become an interesting problem to solve.
Pre-production and demos
The writing started in early 2017 with Crahan and Root in a private space in Los Angeles, swapping demo tapes back and forth. By August 2017 Crahan was telling NME they had "about 27 pieces of work" and that he wanted to make Slipknot's double album, an "art record" in the vein of The Wall or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He had been openly trailing that ambition since 2015. Jim Root, who plays guitar in both Slipknot and Stone Sour, joined the writing in earnest in late 2017 after sitting out a Stone Sour tour to do so.
Corey Taylor was barely in the room for the early sessions. He spent 2017 on the road with Stone Sour promoting Hydrograd and only began writing Slipknot lyrics in early 2018. Most of his work came in a focused burst across spring 2018, with the bulk done by April. Jay Weinberg and Mick Thomson contributed arrangements and additional writing as material went from demos to band rehearsals.
The lyrics are personal in a way Slipknot lyrics rarely are. Taylor's marriage to Stephanie Luby had collapsed in 2016, and he told Loudwire's Jon Wiederhorn in August 2019 that the narrative came from him "working my way through the repercussions of a really toxic relationship. And the fallout that came with finally extricating myself from that relationship." Earlier, talking to Full Metal Jackie in June 2018, he had described the in-progress lyrics as "probably the most autobiographical I've been in years."
"It's been a heavy couple of years for me personally. I've been able to kind of grab hold of some of the depression that I've been fighting and kind of formulate the way that I want to describe it."
Corey Taylor, Loudwire, June 2018
By the end of pre-production the band had a notional double album. By the time they walked into EastWest, they had pared back to a single record. Crahan later told Spotify's Metal Talks podcast that he had tried to "picture myself as a fan in the world that we live in today" and that was what ultimately killed the bonus material. Even All Out Life, the 2018 standalone single whose chorus gives the album its title, was held back for the same reason.
Creating the album
EastWest Studios sits on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It is the studio formerly known as Western Recorders, where Brian Wilson cut most of Pet Sounds, and the kind of room a band who wanted to make an art record might deliberately choose. Crahan arrived first, in November 2018. The rest of the band followed in January 2019. The record was finished by April.
Greg Fidelman ran the desk. He had engineered Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) for Rick Rubin in 2004 and produced .5: The Gray Chapter, and he was already the band's preferred outside ear. Outside of Slipknot, Fidelman was Metallica's go-to engineer for Death Magnetic and Hardwired... to Self-Destruct, which gives a sense of the modern metal sound he is associated with: huge, dry, almost violently mid-range, with no reverb to hide in.
Speaking ahead of the sessions, Taylor credited Fidelman with knowing how to push them. There had been earlier industry rumour that Ross Robinson, the band's original producer on 1999's Slipknot and 2001's Iowa, might come back. Jim Root publicly killed that rumour in October 2018.
"He gets us, he challenges us. We have a great relationship with him."
Corey Taylor on Greg Fidelman, Blabbermouth, January 2019
Root's account of the actual tracking process, given to British retailer HMV in August 2019, is more interesting than the band normally allows itself to be in public. He said the band tracked songs both with and without a click track and used the click-less takes on the finished record. He also said the tracking itself felt rushed compared to the long, comfortable demo phase: "I wish we'd had that time to actually record the album." Crahan, talking to Consequence of Sound, said they tracked twenty-two songs and twenty-six interludes in total. Fifteen full songs with vocals never made the cut.
The mix was handled by Joe Barresi, with mixing assistance from Jun Murakawa. Editing was Dan Monti's. Bob Ludwig, the most-credited mastering engineer in the history of recorded music, mastered. Engineering on the floor was split between Greg Gordon, Sara Killion and Paul Fig, with Bo Bodnar and Chaz Sexton assisting. The album cover and inner art were designed by Michael Boland, with all band photography by Alexandria Crahan-Conway, Shawn Crahan's daughter.
- Sessions ran roughly five and a half months, November 2018 to April 2019.
- Tracked at EastWest Studios, Hollywood, in Studios 1 and 2.
- Twenty-two songs and twenty-six interludes recorded; fourteen songs released on the standard edition.
- The band tracked with and without a click; only click-less takes were used.
- Chris Fehn was fired in the middle of mixing; his percussion appears only on the bonus track All Out Life.
Personnel and credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Lead and backing vocals | Corey Taylor (#8) | Sole lyricist on the record |
| Guitars | Mick Thomson (#7) | Co-writer on Nero Forte, Critical Darling, Spiders |
| Guitars | Jim Root (#4) | Primary writing partner with Crahan from February 2017 |
| Bass, piano, synthesizer | Alessandro "Vman" Venturella (V) | First album with significant keys credit |
| Drums | Jay Weinberg (J) | Tracked without triggers on most songs; widely cited as his career-best Slipknot performance |
| Percussion, backing vocals, art direction, photography | Shawn "Clown" Crahan (#6) | Original creative architect of the album; directed the Unsainted video |
| Samples, media, keyboards | Craig "133" Jones (#5) | Final Slipknot studio album before his June 2023 departure |
| Turntables, keyboards | Sid Wilson (#0) | Tracking finished April 2019 |
| Additional musicians (credited) | ||
| Choral vocals | Angel City Chorale | The full LA-based community choir, on Unsainted |
| Percussion and backing vocals | Chris Fehn (#3) | Only on the bonus track All Out Life, recorded before his March 2019 departure |
| Additional vocals | Kat Primeau | On the interlude Death Because of Death |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Production | Greg Fidelman with Slipknot | Fidelman's third Slipknot project after Vol. 3 (engineer) and The Gray Chapter (producer) |
| Engineering | Greg Fidelman, Greg Gordon, Sara Killion, Paul Fig | |
| Engineering assistance | Bo Bodnar, Chaz Sexton | |
| Mixing | Joe Barresi | Known for Tool, Queens of the Stone Age, Bad Religion |
| Mixing assistance | Jun Murakawa | |
| Editing | Dan Monti | |
| Mastering | Bob Ludwig | Gateway Mastering, Portland, Maine |
| Artwork | ||
| Design | Michael Boland | Sigil-on-yellow cover |
| Band photography | Alexandria Crahan-Conway | Shawn Crahan's daughter; long-standing band photographer |
| The replaced and the replacement | ||
| Touring percussion (Tortilla Man) | Michael Pfaff | Replaced Chris Fehn from mid-2019. Officially confirmed by name on 16 March 2022, nearly three years later. Did not record on the album. |
The most interesting personnel story is the one that isn't on the credits page. Tortilla Man does not play on We Are Not Your Kind. He inherited the percussion role too late to track anything, and the album was finished without him. His first full appearance on a Slipknot record came on 2022's The End, So Far. For three years his identity was the subject of online forensic obsession, in part because the band kept dropping increasingly transparent hints. The fan-coined name came from a leaked photo where his mask looked, briefly, like a flat round tortilla.
The songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Insert Coin | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 1:38 | No | Synth interlude; Taylor's processed mantra of the album title |
| 2 | Unsainted | Taylor, Root, Crahan, Venturella | 4:20 | Yes (1st) | Choir-led opener with Angel City Chorale; US Mainstream Rock #10 |
| 3 | Birth of the Cruel | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 4:35 | Yes (3rd) | Industrial drum tension into a Slipknot-typical chorus |
| 4 | Death Because of Death | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 1:20 | No | Interlude with Kat Primeau on vocals |
| 5 | Nero Forte | Taylor, Root, Thomson, Crahan, Venturella | 5:15 | Yes (4th) | Released as the fourth single, December 2019 |
| 6 | Critical Darling | Taylor, Root, Thomson, Crahan | 6:25 | No | Fan favourite that opens with a long, brooding mid-tempo build |
| 7 | A Liar's Funeral | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 5:27 | No | Acoustic-into-roar dynamic; one of Taylor's most direct lyrics about his marriage |
| 8 | Red Flag | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 4:11 | No | Closest the record gets to old-school Iowa-era thrash-punk |
| 9 | What's Next | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 0:53 | No | Sub-minute electronic transition |
| 10 | Spiders | Taylor, Root, Thomson, Crahan | 4:03 | No | Piano-led art-rock; the most divisive song on the record |
| 11 | Orphan | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 6:01 | No | Jay Weinberg's fastest blast-beat playing on the album |
| 12 | My Pain | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 6:48 | No | Drone and hushed vocal; written about Taylor's marital collapse |
| 13 | Not Long for This World | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 6:35 | No | Breathy, almost trip-hop atmosphere; Pitchfork compared it to Portishead |
| 14 | Solway Firth | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 5:56 | Yes (2nd) | Closer; named for the Scottish estuary; some of Taylor's most violent screaming on record |
| 15 | All Out Life (Japan bonus) | Taylor, Root, Crahan | 5:40 | 2018 standalone | Source of the album title; only Slipknot track to feature Chris Fehn on the album package |
"Unsainted" is the song the band put their entire commercial hopes on. It opens with Angel City Chorale, a full Los Angeles community choir, singing an unaccompanied phrase before Weinberg's snare punches a hole in the room and the entire band crashes in. Pitchfork's Andy O'Connor called it a "reboot of the Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want fuelled by Midwest desolation." It hit number 10 on the US Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, their best showing since 2014's "The Devil In I", and number 68 on the UK Singles Chart, their best there since 2008's "Psychosocial".
"Spiders" is the one that broke fans into two camps and stayed broken. It is essentially a piano-led art-noir song. There are almost no Slipknot guitars in the verses. Jim Root, who co-wrote it with Thomson, Crahan and Taylor, has said in interviews it grew out of an acoustic guitar and glockenspiel sketch. Pitchfork hated it ("cabaret piano too hokey for a band that is essentially a macabre traveling carnival"). Kerrang loved it. It exists on the record as the most literal expression of Crahan's art-record ambition.
"Solway Firth", the closer, is named for the estuary that separates England from Scotland. It exists mostly so Corey Taylor can scream "you wanted a real smile, this is the best that you're going to get from me" until the song stops. The Loudwire interview around release pinned it directly to Taylor's divorce. Sam Taylor of the Financial Times wrote that the record "often verges on the attritional," and "Solway Firth" is where that line gets earned.
"The narrative really came from me working my way through the repercussions of a really toxic relationship. And the fallout that came with finally extricating myself from that relationship."
Corey Taylor on the lyrical content, Loudwire, August 2019
"Critical Darling", "A Liar's Funeral", "My Pain" and "Not Long for This World" are the album's middle hour, and they are where the band's older fans either climb on board or get off. "Critical Darling" is structurally closest to vintage Slipknot but moves at half speed. "A Liar's Funeral" opens on a finger-picked acoustic intro that Taylor sings over softly for almost a minute before the band kicks in. "Not Long for This World" leans almost entirely on Weinberg's brushed-feel drumming and Venturella's piano. Adam Rees in Metal Hammer highlighted both "A Liar's Funeral" and "Not Long for This World" as having "the biggest impact" on the record.
B-sides, outtakes and lost songs
By Crahan's own count to Kerrang! in July 2019, "There's another 15 songs that didn't make the cut... there's at least seven or eight songs that are recorded, with vocals, that did not make this album." Add the twenty-six recorded interludes and the band almost made the double album they originally promised. Almost none of that material has officially surfaced.
The one major outtake-that-wasn't is All Out Life. Slipknot released it as a standalone single on 31 October 2018, complete with a Crahan-directed video that broke the band's own YouTube record by clocking 3.4 million views in its first day. The song was originally slated for the album. The chorus is the literal source of the album title. When the final tracklist was revealed, it wasn't on it. Taylor later told Kerrang! the song "was kind of its own thing that really just let people know that we weren't gone." Crahan told Spotify he didn't want fans paying for a song they could already stream.
Beyond that, the deep cuts from this session sit on hard drives at EastWest and in Crahan's archive. He has periodically hinted at unreleased WANYK-era material, but nothing has formally appeared on anniversary editions, which is unusual for an album of this commercial weight.
Album artwork and packaging
The cover is a goat-headed sigil on a flat yellow ground, designed by Michael Boland. There is no band photo. There is no title. There is just the sigil, an oddly direct piece of design for a band whose previous artwork tended to be claustrophobic photographic collages. Crahan acted as art director; his daughter Alexandria Crahan-Conway shot all the band photography that appears in the booklet and on the inner sleeves.
The visual reset extended to the masks. Every member got a new mask for the album cycle, and the redesigns were unveiled at Knotfest Mexico in December 2018 before any music was out, then shown on humans for the first time in the "Unsainted" video on 16 May 2019. Taylor's was a stitched-mouth leather demon face. Crahan's was a half-melted clown. Weinberg's was a black death mask. The visual ethos returned to the chaotic, mismatched individuality of the early albums and away from the more uniform aesthetic of the .5: The Gray Chapter cycle.
Release and reception
The album landed on Friday 9 August 2019 and was met with the best critical response Slipknot had received since 2001's Iowa. Metacritic averaged 89 out of 100 across fourteen mainstream reviews. Kerrang!, NME and The Independent gave it five stars. The Guardian, AllMusic and Metal Hammer gave it four. Consequence of Sound gave it an A. Rolling Stone gave it three and a half. Only Pitchfork (6.7, Andy O'Connor) and Sputnikmusic struck the dissenting note, and even they conceded it was the band's best work in fifteen years.
"An astonishing record: a roaring, horrifying delve into the guts of the band's revulsion, a primal scream of endlessly inventive extreme metal and searing misanthropy."
Jordan Bassett, NME, August 2019
Year-end and decade-end lists confirmed the consensus. Kerrang! placed it at number one on their 50 Best Albums of 2019. Rolling Stone made it their number one metal album of the year. Revolver had it at number two; Consequence at number three. On the decade-end retrospectives, Louder Sound placed it third on their fifty best metal albums of the 2010s, Kerrang eighth on their best seventy-five albums of the decade, and Consequence fifteenth on their twenty-five best metal records.
At the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards in January 2020, We Are Not Your Kind received a Best Rock Album nomination. It lost to Cage the Elephant's Social Cues.
Singles and music videos
| Single | Release | Video director | Notable chart positions | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Out Life | 31 Oct 2018 | M. Shawn Crahan | US Hot Rock Songs 18 | Standalone single nearly a year before the album. Broke band YouTube record (3.4m first-day views). |
| Unsainted | 16 May 2019 | M. Shawn Crahan | US Mainstream Rock 10; UK Singles 68 | 4.7m YouTube views in first day, immediately broke the record All Out Life had just set. Filmed in a Cleveland church with a 35-piece choir. |
| Solway Firth | 22 July 2019 | M. Shawn Crahan | US Hot Rock Songs 14 | Music video incorporates live Knotfest 2019 footage and clips from Amazon's The Boys, season one |
| Birth of the Cruel | 5 August 2019 | M. Shawn Crahan | US Hot Rock Songs 14 | Released four days before the album dropped |
| Nero Forte | 16 December 2019 | M. Shawn Crahan | US Hot Rock Songs 11 | Video appears as one segment of Crahan's twenty-minute experimental short film Pollution |
The "Unsainted" video is the visual centrepiece of the campaign. Crahan directed it himself. Most of it is shot inside a Catholic church, with a thirty-five-piece choir robed in black, a single coffin in the aisle, and the nine band members in their newly unveiled masks. The combination of the choir's actual unison opening, Weinberg's snare hit and the first reveal of the new masks was deliberately constructed to function as the band's reintroduction to the public. It worked: 4.7 million YouTube views inside the first twenty-four hours, an instant new record for Slipknot.
The Solway Firth video, also Crahan-directed, intercuts the band performing in masks with live footage from the 2019 Knotfest Roadshow and licensed clips from Amazon's superhero series The Boys, which had launched seven weeks earlier and which the band were openly fans of. The Nero Forte video is a self-contained segment of Crahan's longer, near-wordless film Pollution, which was released in full in January 2020.
Touring and live
Slipknot debuted "Unsainted" and "All Out Life" live on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on 17 May 2019, their first US TV appearance since 2016. The Knotfest Roadshow, their own touring festival, ran across North America from late July through September 2019 with Volbeat, Gojira and Behemoth as the main support package. A European arena tour followed in January and February 2020.
The 2019 summer-festival run included the band's fourth Download Festival headline slot in June, in front of roughly 100,000 people on the Friday night. A planned support slot for Metallica's WorldWired tour in Australia and New Zealand in October 2019 was scrapped after James Hetfield re-entered rehab. The whole projected summer 2020 stadium leg of the album cycle was then erased by COVID-19, which is part of why the touring cycle for this record feels truncated compared to previous Slipknot campaigns.
- 17 May 2019: Live debut of Unsainted on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
- 14 June 2019: Fourth Download Festival headline slot, Donington
- Summer 2019: European festival run including Graspop, Rock Werchter, Hellfest
- 26 July to 8 September 2019: Knotfest Roadshow North America with Volbeat, Gojira, Behemoth
- Jan-Feb 2020: UK and European arena tour with Behemoth
- Summer 2020: Planned stadium tour cancelled due to COVID-19
In TV, film and media
Although the album itself has not generated a huge sync catalogue, "Solway Firth" was famously used in the marketing for season one of Amazon's The Boys, with audio and visual elements crossing both ways between the show and the song's music video. "Unsainted" became a standard sports-arena entry music cut for several US wrestlers and an MMA walkout standard. "Nero Forte" appears as a playable track in Beat Saber's Slipknot music pack, which was added in 2022.
Controversy, censorship and lawsuits
The defining piece of legal drama around We Are Not Your Kind is the Chris Fehn lawsuit. Fehn had been Slipknot's percussionist since the autumn of 1998, replacing Brandon Darner. On 14 March 2019, with the album in late mixing, he filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York alleging that Corey Taylor and Shawn Crahan had created undisclosed Slipknot-related business entities in multiple US states which collected income that should have been distributed across the band. He sought a full forensic accounting of every Slipknot entity and damages for misappropriated profits.
Taylor responded the same day on Twitter with a brief, lawyered statement promising "the truth comes out". Four days later, on 18 March, the band's official site announced that "Chris knows why he is no longer a part of Slipknot. We are disappointed that he chose to point fingers and manufacture claims, rather than doing what was necessary to continue to be a part of Slipknot." The notice was removed from the site a few days later. Fehn's lawyer told Loudwire that his client's employment status had not actually changed since the filing, which only deepened the confusion in fan forums.
The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. Terms have not been disclosed publicly. Fehn went on to form the band Vimic and to tour his own projects, and was a notable mourner at Joey Jordison's 2021 funeral. He has not publicly reconciled with Slipknot.
Covers, samples and tributes
The album is too recent to have a deep cover-version legacy yet, but two strands of afterlife are worth flagging. First, City Morgue, the New York rap-metal duo, openly perform "Wait and Bleed" at their shows and have repeatedly cited Slipknot's early albums, particularly Iowa, as foundational; Andy O'Connor's Pitchfork review of We Are Not Your Kind noted this and used it to argue Slipknot themselves were missing the obvious modern hip-hop-meets-metal opening this record could have walked through. Second, "Unsainted"'s choir-led opening has been copied wholesale, in spirit, by a generation of post-2020 metalcore openers, including bands on Sumerian and Rise.
On Slipknot's own back catalogue, "Unsainted" has become a permanent fixture in the live set, alongside "Wait and Bleed", "Duality", "Psychosocial" and "Before I Forget". It is the only track from this album to have achieved that status; the next most-played is "Solway Firth".
Reissues, remasters and anniversaries
Unusually for a Slipknot record of this commercial weight, We Are Not Your Kind has not been given a deluxe expansion. There is no anniversary edition, no demos disc, no live disc, no Atmos remix officially released through Apple Music, and no expanded vinyl box set. Roadrunner have reissued it on coloured vinyl on a few occasions but the content is unchanged. The most likely explanation is that the band's relationship with Roadrunner formally ended on 1 April 2023, after The End, So Far closed out the contract, and the catalogue's commercial direction has been in flux since. In November 2025 Slipknot sold a majority stake in their entire catalogue to HarbourView Equity Partners, which makes a future archival reissue programme more rather than less likely.
Legacy and influence
Two things make We Are Not Your Kind matter in 2026, six and a half years after release. The first is that it ended the question of whether Slipknot could still be a critically serious proposition after the death of Paul Gray. The second is that it set a template for how a legacy nu metal band can age into something else without changing their name. The lineup that recorded the album is also already historical: Craig Jones left in June 2023, Jay Weinberg was abruptly fired in November 2023, Eloy Casagrande replaced Weinberg in 2024. The eight-man, Tortilla-Man-touring band of 2019 no longer exists.
Weinberg's playing on this album is the most-cited single factor in his eventual cult status. The Pitchfork review described his drumming as "relentless bashing" that should "nip any metal G checks in the bud." When the band fired him in 2023 with no public explanation, fan reaction was largely shaped by what he had played on We Are Not Your Kind, and his post-Slipknot career has been built directly on that reputation.
"Twenty years since their debut, Slipknot are as bold, fearless and exhilarating as ever."
Emily Carter, Kerrang!, August 2019
For Corey Taylor, the record's lyrical openness made it possible to talk in public about his depression and the end of his marriage in a way Slipknot lyrics had not previously allowed. He has subsequently said in multiple interviews, including a December 2021 conversation with Kerrang, that he prefers the songs on The End, So Far to those on We Are Not Your Kind. Most listeners, and most year-end-list compilers, do not agree with him.
Things you might not know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The lawsuit's exact date | Chris Fehn filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York on 14 March 2019, twelve days before the album release date had been announced. |
| Title-source song isn't on the album | The phrase "we are not your kind" comes from the chorus of All Out Life, the 2018 standalone single that only appears on the Japanese edition as a bonus track. |
| Tortilla Man didn't play | Michael Pfaff replaced Fehn on the road from mid-2019, but appears nowhere on the album. His first Slipknot studio appearance is 2022's The End, So Far. |
| The mask reveal was four months early | The nine new masks were unveiled at Knotfest Mexico in December 2018, five months before any new music was out, and only seen on the band's faces in the Unsainted video on 16 May 2019. |
| Crahan wanted Slipknot's Sgt Pepper | From 2015 onwards he publicly described the goal as a double "art record" in the vein of The Wall or Sgt Pepper. The double album was abandoned in early sessions but twenty-two songs and twenty-six interludes were tracked. |
| The cover photographer is Clown's daughter | All band photography in the booklet is by Alexandria Crahan-Conway. She has been the band's primary photographer for several album cycles. |
| Bob Ludwig mastered it | The same Bob Ludwig who mastered Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy, Springsteen's Born to Run, Radiohead's OK Computer and Nirvana's Nevermind also mastered We Are Not Your Kind, from his Gateway Mastering room in Portland, Maine. |
| Joe Barresi mixed | The mix was done not by Fidelman but by Joe Barresi, best known for his work with Tool and Queens of the Stone Age. He has not subsequently mixed a Slipknot album. |
| Angel City Chorale on Unsainted | The choir on Unsainted is not a session group; it is the actual Angel City Chorale, a 160-voice community choir based in Los Angeles best known for singing "Africa" by Toto on America's Got Talent in 2018. |
| The Boys connection | The Solway Firth music video uses audio and visual clips from Amazon's superhero series The Boys, season one. Eric Kripke later said the band reached out to the show, not the other way around. |
| Unsainted broke their own YouTube record twice | All Out Life set a new band record in October 2018 with 3.4 million first-day YouTube views. Unsainted broke that record seven months later with 4.7 million. |
| It is their only eight-man album | Slipknot have been a nine-piece for every other album of their career; We Are Not Your Kind is the only one recorded as an eight-piece, because Fehn's firing happened before Tortilla Man was hired. |
| The Grammy that got away | The album lost the 2020 Best Rock Album Grammy to Cage the Elephant's Social Cues, a decision that the metal press treated as further evidence the Grammys do not understand the rock category. |
| First UK number one in eighteen years | It debuted atop the UK Albums Chart with 31,800 units, 25,500 of which were physical copies, denying Ed Sheeran a fifth consecutive week at number one with No.6 Collaborations Project. Slipknot's previous UK number one was Iowa in 2001. |
Listen on the podcast
If this article has put you in the mood to dig back into Slipknot's mid-career pivot, the Riffology podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and all the usual platforms. We talk about records like this one most weeks, often with the people who were in the room, and the show is always free.
