The guitarist who played on almost every track of Slipknot had quit the band before it came out. The percussionist credited in the booklet never played on it. And the producer, Ross Robinson, spent the sessions at Indigo Ranch in Malibu trying to knock instruments out of the band's hands and, in Corey Taylor's words, "throwing punches at us."
Out of that chaos came the album that gave Roadrunner Records its first platinum record and the fastest-selling metal debut in SoundScan's history. Slipknot landed on 29 June 1999 without the benefit of press, radio or MTV support. Nine masked men from Des Moines, Iowa, an opening slot at Ozzfest and word of mouth did the rest.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Slipknot |
| Album | Slipknot |
| Release Date | 29 June 1999 (reissued December 1999) |
| Label | Roadrunner |
| Producer(s) | Ross Robinson, Slipknot |
| Studio(s) | Indigo Ranch, Malibu, California |
| Genre / Subgenre | Nu metal, groove metal |
| Track Count | 15 (original CD) |
| Total Runtime | 60:24 (original CD) |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 51 |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 37 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | No. 1 US Heatseekers and Independent Albums; Australia 32; Canada 50; UK Rock & Metal 3 (No. 1 in 2022) |
| Certifications | RIAA 3x Platinum; Music Canada 2x Platinum; BPI Platinum; ARIA Platinum |
| Estimated Sales | Not found |
| Key Singles | Wait and Bleed, Spit It Out |
Cultural Context: Metal in the Summer of 1999
Limp Bizkit released Significant Other on 22 June 1999. Seven days later, Slipknot arrived. Metal Hammer's Tommy Udo later described a scene still caught in grunge's fallout, with Korn and Limp Bizkit on permanent MTV rotation and nothing outside the underground challenging the old guard of Slayer, Metallica and Megadeth.
Slipknot had to fight on two fronts. Their masks and imagery, Udo wrote, "guaranteed fodder for the ban-it brigade in the wake of the Columbine shootings." Yet the first people to sneer were metal's own underground, who filed them as another nu-metal band. The tag upset Joey Jordison in the extreme. He argued that songs like Surfacing and (sic) were rooted in "death metal, thrash, speed metal," with super-fast 16th-note double-bass that "none of those fuckers in the other bands they lump us with could contend with."
Slipknot's Story Up to 1998
Shawn Crahan, Paul Gray and vocalist Anders Colsefni started a band called the Pale Ones in September 1995. Gray invited a local drummer, Joey Jordison, to a rehearsal; Jordison took the drum stool and Crahan moved to percussion. They made their live debut on 5 November 1995 as Meld, and by late 1995 Jordison had suggested renaming the band after one of their songs: Slipknot.
Jordison was working nights at a gas station at the time, and much of the band's blueprint was drawn up there with Crahan and Gray in the small hours. It cost him the job. "We literally had people pull up, see me and Shawn sitting in the window, floor it out of there and go to the Amoco station across the street," he told Metal Hammer.
The self-financed Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat., produced by Sean McMahon at SR Audio in Des Moines for an estimated $40,000, came out on Halloween 1996 in a run of 1,000 copies. It drew no label interest. Between 1996 and 1998 the lineup churned constantly:
- Guitarist Donnie Steele left in February 1996; Craig Jones replaced him, then moved to samples.
- Mick Thomson came in on guitar.
- Corey Taylor was poached from fellow Des Moines band Stone Sour.
- Colsefni announced his exit on stage in September 1997; Greg "Cuddles" Welts took his percussion slot.
- DJ Sid Wilson became the ninth member in 1998.
A five-track demo for labels in early 1998 changed everything. Epic and Hollywood Records were sniffing around, but Ross Robinson, fresh from Korn and Limp Bizkit, came to rehearsals in Des Moines in February 1998 and offered to produce. He signed them to his own I Am imprint and then helped steer them to Roadrunner, where A&R boss Monte Conner admitted, "it was really my wife who persuaded me to sign Slipknot." The $500,000, seven-album deal was signed publicly on 8 July 1998. Two days earlier Welts had been fired, something the band have refused to comment on; his replacement Brandon Darner left shortly after joining, and Chris Fehn joined before the band headed west. By release day, Ultimate Classic Rock counted, Slipknot were on their seventh lineup.
Pre-production and Demos
Plenty of Slipknot was older than it sounded. Working with Taylor at SR Audio in 1997, the band cut material for a Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. follow-up that never got past pre-production: "Slipknot", "Gently", "Do Nothing/Bitchslap", "Tattered & Torn", "Heartache and a Pair of Scissors", "Me Inside", "Coleslaw", "Carve", "Windows" and "May 17". The song "Slipknot" became (sic), which Jordison said dated back to his very first rehearsal with the band on 15 September 1995. Crahan claimed he and Gray had written the riff and drum beat "many years before we started Slipknot."
Purity was originally called Despise. "It didn't work when we tried to put it together," Taylor said, until Robinson "took it and helped us restructure it." Wait and Bleed and Spit It Out were both on the 1998 demo, and a pre-Indigo Ranch demo of Prosthetics finally surfaced in 2025.
"We hadn't recorded the album yet; we hadn't gone out and toured; we didn't know how people were going to take us. So we'd just written the songs for us. There was no audience until then."
Corey Taylor, Metal Hammer (Louder)
Creating Slipknot at Indigo Ranch
Slipknot left Des Moines for Indigo Ranch in Malibu on 29 September 1998. In those days, Metal Hammer noted, the band travelled economy and slept wherever they fell, on couches if they were lucky and on hard floors if not. During the sessions Jordison went to see Mike Patton's supergroup Fantômas at the Troubadour, a gig he later remembered simply as "magic", and Fantômas went on to shape the band's new material.
Robinson wanted the intensity of the live show on tape, and he was willing to get physical to find it. He talked the band out of their more experimental sections and their guitar solos, steering them towards straight-ahead metal. All the drums were recorded inside three days. "I was working out every day just to stay on top of that record," he told Metal Hammer.
"It was spontaneous, it was violent. Things were getting broken. We were out there away from anyone else, nobody dropping by or hanging out, it got crazy really quickly."
Ross Robinson, Metal Hammer (Louder)
The band gave as good as they got. "Ross pushed us and we pushed back," said Taylor. "It was a fight." Jordison remembered Robinson making him pound the kit so hard his hands bled "when we were just setting up the drum levels." According to Revolver, Robinson would try to knock instruments out of players' hands, yelling "You can play that shit harder!" A 2012 Kerrang! account of the (sic) session had everyone tracking in one room, headphones tied to their heads, while Robinson threw potted plants at Jordison. Taylor said that by the end he was "literally broken completely in half and wide open and bawling and I couldn't stop crying."
By 11 November 1998 the record seemed finished and the band went home to Des Moines. Over Christmas, guitarist Josh Brainard, who had played on every track so far, quit. Rumour put it down to family pressures; Brainard denied that, saying only that "some decisions were made that I wasn't particularly happy with." Taylor's Stone Sour bandmate Jim Root took his place, and in February 1999 the band returned to Malibu and cut one new song, Purity.
Mixing was its own ordeal. Robinson and Jordison mixed the whole album on analogue equipment rather than the digital formats then becoming standard. Robb Flynn, who had just finished Machine Head's The Burning Red in the same studio, recalled the pair spending almost a month on Purity alone so it could serve as a template for the rest. Spit It Out never made it through the process at all: after faster and slower remakes, the band decided they could not beat the original 1998 demo and used that. Eddy Schreyer mastered the record at Oasis Mastering in Studio City.
Personnel and Credits
The booklet numbered the band from zero to eight, and two of those numbers tell a story. Number 4 is Jim Root, who plays only on Purity; the guitar everywhere else is Brainard's. Number 3 is Chris Fehn, credited on percussion but absent from the recordings, while the departed Welts plays on Spit It Out.
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Vocals | Corey Taylor (#8) | |
| Guitar | Mick Thomson (#7) | |
| Percussion | Shawn "Clown" Crahan (#6) | |
| Samples, media | Craig "133" Jones (#5) | |
| Guitar | Jim Root (#4) | Purity only |
| Percussion | Chris Fehn (#3) | Credited but did not play |
| Bass | Paul Gray (#2) | |
| Drums | Joey Jordison (#1) | Also co-mixed the album |
| Turntables | Sid Wilson (#0) | |
| Additional musicians | ||
| Guitar | Josh Brainard | Every track except Purity |
| Percussion | Greg "Cuddles" Welts | Spit It Out and demo tracks |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer, mixing | Ross Robinson | |
| Co-production | Slipknot | Produced Spit It Out |
| Mixing, engineer | Chuck Johnson | |
| Mixing | Sean McMahon | Spit It Out |
| Second engineer | Rob Agnello | |
| Location recording | Steven Remote | |
| Mastering | Eddy Schreyer | Oasis Mastering, Studio City |
| Artwork | ||
| Cover photography | Stefan Seskis | Cover and tray card |
| Band photography | Dean Karr | |
| Design, lettering | T42Design | |
| Creative director | Lynda Kusnetz | |
The Songs on Slipknot
The liner notes credit every song to Slipknot; the writers below are the ones identified in later accounts.
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 742617000027 | Jones | 0:36 | Named after the Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. barcode | |
| 2 | (sic) | Gray, Crahan | 3:20 | Began life in 1995 as "Slipknot" | |
| 3 | Eyeless | Taylor (lyrics) | 3:56 | Samples Videodrome | |
| 4 | Wait and Bleed | Jordison, Taylor | 2:27 | Yes | Grammy-nominated |
| 5 | Surfacing | Gray, Jordison, Thomson, Taylor | 3:38 | Paradiddles in the drum part | |
| 6 | Spit It Out | Gray, Jordison, Thomson, Crahan, Taylor | 2:39 | Yes | The original 1998 demo recording |
| 7 | Tattered & Torn | Crahan | 2:54 | Re-recorded from Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. | |
| 8 | Frail Limb Nursery | 0:45 | Withdrawn December 1999 | ||
| 9 | Purity | Taylor (lyrics) | 4:14 | Jim Root's only track; withdrawn December 1999 | |
| 10 | Liberate | Slipknot | 3:06 | ||
| 11 | Prosthetics | Jordison, Taylor (lyrics) | 4:58 | Pre-Indigo Ranch demo released in 2025 | |
| 12 | No Life | Taylor (lyrics) | 2:47 | ||
| 13 | Diluted | Gray, Jordison, Crahan, Jones, Taylor | 3:23 | Samples Rupert Everett in Cemetery Man | |
| 14 | Only One | Gray, Jordison, Crahan, Taylor | 2:26 | Re-recorded from Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. | |
| 15 | Scissors | Jordison (lyrics) | 19:15 | Hides "Mudslide" and "Eeyore" after the silence |
742617000027 and (sic)
The opener is Craig Jones's collage of scratches and noise, built around the line "The whole thing, I think it's sick," lifted from the 1973 documentary Manson. Jordison claimed it was Taylor's voice sped up. It drops straight into (sic), which samples Al Pacino's "Here comes the pain" from Carlito's Way. Revolver later listed (sic) among the greatest album-opening songs in metal.
Eyeless
Eyeless opens on a breakbeat sample and draws on a raving street dweller the band ran into in New York while visiting Roadrunner's offices to sign their contract. That is where the line about seeing California "without Marlon Brando's eyes" came from. "He was running around, screaming it at everyone," Mick Thomson recalled. "Though I think his choice of actor was pretty cool."
Wait and Bleed
Jordison wrote the music alone and brought it to rehearsal, where Taylor wrote the lyrics "really fast" in the practice space. It shows off the band's melodic side, and Taylor has said it is about "that switch in your head that can go at any moment," the point where a civilised person becomes capable of terrible acts.
Spit It Out and Surfacing
Spit It Out was the centrepiece of the 1998 demo that manager Sophia John got to Robinson. AllMusic's Rick Anderson called it "speed rap metal." Surfacing, with its paradiddle drum work and its "Fuck it all/Fuck this world" lyric, was the song Thomson and Crahan reportedly wanted as a single instead.
Scissors and Eeyore
Metal Hammer called Scissors the album's "money shot", eight and a half minutes of rambling stream of consciousness on which, AllMusic noted, Taylor "sounds like he's about to burst into tears." Then the CD keeps running. After nearly five minutes of silence comes "Mudslide", a stretch of band conversation, and then the hidden track Eeyore, introduced by the band's commentary on a particularly foul scene in an adult film. Eeyore has been played live many times and turns up on Disasterpieces and 9.0: Live.
B-sides, Remixes and Lost Songs
Slipknot's debut era threw off a pile of extras, most of them gathered on later digipak editions:
- Me Inside: an SR Audio-era song that replaced Purity on the December 1999 reissue.
- Get This: a digipak bonus track, and one Jordison cited as proof of the band's death metal roots.
- Interloper and Despise: demos added as digipak bonuses.
- Wait and Bleed (Terry Date mix): the single version, with sung verses replacing the screams.
- Spit It Out (Overcaffeinated Hyper Version) and the slower Stamp You Out mix: the abandoned remakes.
- (sic) (Molt-Injected Mix): an Ulrich Wild remix on the Wait and Bleed CD single.
- Snap: a demo that surfaced on the 10th anniversary edition.
Frail Limb Nursery, the 45-second prelude to Purity, has never been re-released as a standalone track.
Album Artwork and Packaging
Stefan Seskis shot the cover: all nine members in red boiler suits, crammed together in front of a set of curved bars, each in a different mask. A spiked headpiece rises at the back, a gas mask and a grinning clown face sit to the right, and a long-nosed white mask fills the foreground with a hand resting on top of it. The scratchy white Slipknot logo runs across the top, and the whole photo is scuffed and scratched. Dean Karr took the band photography, T42Design handled design and lettering, Lynda Kusnetz was creative director, and the packaging concept is credited to Slipknot themselves.
Release and Reception
The reviews were strong. AllMusic's Rick Anderson called it "an auspicious debut" and added: "You thought Limp Bizkit was hard? They're The Osmonds." Kerrang! gave it five stars and called it "raw and wholly uncompromising, each track delivered a powerful blow to the senses." Rolling Stone heard "metal with a capital m" and "the first death metal jam band," Q a "terrifying racket," and Alternative Press praised its "inventive sampling, creative guitar work and an absolute percussive overload." Not everyone was sold: Classic Rock's Jon Hotten, reviewing the 2009 reissue, called it a "scary, genre-busting debut" but judged that the band did not look "built to endure".
The album topped Billboard's Heatseekers and Independent Albums charts, peaked at No. 51 on the Billboard 200 and No. 37 in the UK, and finished 2000 as the Billboard 200's 98th biggest album. On 2 May 2000 it became the first Roadrunner release ever certified platinum by the RIAA. Within months it was the label's best-ever seller, and at the time the biggest-selling extreme metal album. BPI platinum followed in 2008 and RIAA triple platinum in 2025, and in 2022 it topped the UK Rock & Metal Albums chart.
Wait and Bleed earned the band their first Grammy nomination, for Best Metal Performance in 2001, losing to Deftones' "Elite". It did win Best Single at the 2000 Kerrang! Awards.
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Released | UK Singles | Other peaks | Video |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wait and Bleed | 28 July 1999 | 27 | US Mainstream Rock 34; UK Rock 1; Australia 46 | Thomas Mignone (live); claymation version |
| Spit It Out | 2000 | 28 | UK Rock 1 | Thomas Mignone |
Thomas Mignone, who also directed the band's first home video Welcome to Our Neighborhood, shot the first Wait and Bleed video at a show at Ankeny Airfield in Des Moines on 31 July 1999. A second, claymation version shrank the band into doll-sized creatures loose in a laboratory, who end up setting their captor on fire.
Spit It Out was an homage to The Shining, shot at the Villa Carlotta in Hollywood and cut against live footage. Taylor played Jack Torrance, Jordison was Danny, Crahan and Fehn were the Grady twins, and Jim Root was Wendy. MTV banned it for its violence, including Taylor's axe through the door and Root laying into him with a bat, and a re-edited, less violent version aired instead.
Touring and Live
One of Roadrunner's best moves was getting Slipknot onto Ozzfest 1999. It was only the opening slot, and the album came out halfway through the tour, but the crowds got the message. Next came a Coal Chamber tour with Slipknot third on the bill, under Machine Head.
"Halfway through that tour, we ended up switching places with Machine Head and becoming direct support. Because we would play, and this is nothing against any of these bands, nothing at all, we'd play and half the audience would leave after."
Corey Taylor, 2015, quoted by Ultimate Classic Rock
Soon nobody wanted to take them on tour, Taylor said. "So we had to headline out of necessity." Their first European show, at the London Astoria, entered British metal folklore when Sid Wilson dived off the venue's balcony. Twice.
The Purity Controversy
Purity and its prelude Frail Limb Nursery were inspired by a story on the website Crime Scene about a girl called Purity Knight, kidnapped and buried alive. Frail Limb Nursery even sampled audio from the site. The catch was that Crime Scene published fiction dressed as true crime, with no disclaimer at the time, and Taylor, for one, believed it. "I still think the story's real," Taylor insisted in the 2001 biography Slipknot: Inside the Sickness, Behind the Masks. "It fucked our whole world up when we read it."
Facing copyright allegations, Slipknot pulled both tracks rather than risk the whole album being withdrawn. Slightly remastered pressings appeared in December 1999 with Me Inside in their place. Taylor later claimed the lyrics had been written five years before the song's release, with only the name borrowed from the story and the real inspiration coming from films such as Boxing Helena and The Collector. Purity resurfaced on Disasterpieces, 9.0: Live, the best-of Antennas to Hell and the 10th anniversary edition.
Samples, Syncs and Afterlife
Craig Jones's samples run all through the record. Among the sources identified by Kerrang!:
- Julie Khaner's dialogue from Videodrome and excerpts of The Winstons' "Amen, Brother" on Eyeless.
- Fatboy Slim's "Track 59" on Surfacing.
- General Degree's "Papa Lover (Dark Remix)" on Spit It Out.
- Slayer's "South of Heaven" on Only One.
- Ice Cube's "Man's Best Friend" and a toilet noise from Duke Nukem 3D on Eeyore.
The traffic has gone the other way too. XXXTentacion and Ski Mask the Slump God sampled Spit It Out in 2017 for Members Only, Vol. 3, and the song turned up on the soundtrack of the video game Evolution Snowboarding.
Reissues and Anniversaries
The 10th anniversary edition, released in digipak and box set form, restored Purity alongside a pile of demos and remixes. Its DVD, directed by Crahan, carried the documentary Of the Sic: Your Nightmares, Our Dreams, all three music videos and a full Dynamo Open Air 2000 concert. A super deluxe version came in packaging styled like a safety deposit box, with a T-shirt, patch, beanie, key chain, collectible cards and a note from Taylor.
The 25th anniversary edition followed on 5 September 2025 through Roadrunner, as a 6LP box on blood-splattered vinyl limited to 1,899 copies, plus 2LP, 2CD and digital editions. It added unreleased demos, alternate versions, early test mixes from Indigo Ranch and SR Audio, and soundboard recordings from a 1999 show at Hartford's Webster Theatre and 2000 shows in the UK and Iowa.
"We loved what we did with the first record but we didn't even know if there was gonna be anything after that."
Jim Root, Rolling Stone Australia, 2025
Slipknot's Legacy and Influence
The lineup Root completed held together until Paul Gray's death in 2010. The band's next album, Iowa, reached No. 3 on the Billboard charts and No. 1 in the UK in 2001. Jordison died in 2021 aged just 46.
"There's no doubt that the album opened the door to a lot more very extreme bands crossing into the mainstream."
Monte Conner, Metal Hammer (Louder)
"It set the bar," agreed Jordison of the debut.
The honours kept arriving. Q put it in its 50 Heaviest Albums of All Time in 2001, and it made Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2011 Metal Hammer readers voted it the best debut album of the previous 25 years, and Revolver readers ranked it the second-greatest nu-metal album in 2018. Loudwire put it seventh in its top 50 nu-metal albums.
Its reach goes well beyond metal. Crack Magazine noted that Deafheaven have credited Slipknot as their gateway to extreme metal, that New York hip-hop extremists City Morgue claim to listen to the album "literally every day", and that even Rihanna has called Slipknot her favourite band. Taylor's own verdict is simpler: "I think we're just kind of our own genre, to be honest."
Things You Might Not Know About Slipknot
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The handshake | Meeting Roadrunner staff, Clown greeted each one with "How does it feel to meet your first platinum artist?", including the label's president and owner. |
| The Baby | Monte Conner said a band member he remembered as "The Baby", the percussionist Cuddles, helped swing him into signing them. |
| The barcode title | The opening track is named after the barcode of Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat., a demo album whose original copies have sold for $1,200 or more. |
| Robinson's recon trip | Scouting the band in Des Moines, Robinson hung out with them in strip bars, "Des Moines' main form of entertainment," according to a weary Taylor. |
| Awards night arson | At one London awards ceremony, having won three prizes, the band smashed their chairs, insulted the audience and set part of the room on fire. |
| Here comes the pain | The Carlito's Way line sampled on (sic) shares its name with Slipknot's 25th-anniversary world tour, Here Comes the Pain, which launched in 2024. |
| Nine on nine | The 10th anniversary edition came out on 9 September 2009, 09/09/09, a nod to the nine members, still the same lineup since the album's release. |
| Blood-filled vinyl | Before the 25th anniversary edition, 100 blood-filled vinyl copies sold via the secret site 742617000027.net sold out instantly and temporarily crashed the site. |
| Triple platinum day | The RIAA certified the album triple platinum on 5 September 2025, the same day the 25th anniversary edition was released. |
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