The End, So Far

With their follow-up to 2019’s <i>We Are Not Your Kind</i>, masked metal battalion Slipknot keep pushing the limits of what the mainstream can withstand. You can hear bristling chunks of death metal, black metal and funk metal on singles “The Chapeltown Rag”, “The Dying Song (Time to Sing)” and “Yen” as the band continue to transcend the nu-metal genre they’re often lumped in with. “After <i>We Are Not Your Kind</i>, we looked at each other like, ‘Man, did we push too far? Did we not push it far enough?’” vocalist Corey Taylor tells Apple Music. “So this album is another extension of boundaries, into territory the listener has never been before. How much further can we take them, but that we feel totally comfortable doing?” As for the album’s semi-apocalyptic title? “There's nothing I hate worse than a typical clichéd album title,” Taylor says. “For me it was like, ‘Where are we right now? What's happening?’ It felt like this was the second stage of our career and we were coming to the end of the tone of the albums that took us out of the original run.”