Slipknot redefined metal with their debut album in 1999, drawing on numerous influences and samples to make a punishing album. Across the subsequent six studio LPs, the Iowa nonet went on to rack up loads of Gold and Platinum certifications, Grammy nominations and wins, and made their way into the cultural zeitgeist, transcending nu metal and the heavy music world as a whole as one of its most prominent flag-bearers.
But which of those seven albums is the absolute best?
We here at The Nu Metal Agenda ranked the albums in a poll, with the best getting seven points, the next best getting six, and so on, with the lowest-ranked effort getting one point. We asked our Bluesky followers as well, doing our best to find the Pulse of the Maggots, as it were, and there were varying answers there as well, but at least according to us, here is the definitive ranking of the catalog of Slipknot, presented before it may be sold for some $120 million.
Honorable Mention: Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat (1996)
What an oddity of an album.
It's hard to imagine a version of Slipknot without Sid Wilson's record scratches, Mick Thompson's powerhouse riffs, and even Corey Taylor's iconic growls. Yet here it is. If Slipknot is a wild animal, 'Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat.' is the bones. A basic skeleton for the real meat to be built upon. What's here isn't super remarkable, yet it laid the foundation for one of the frontrunners in the nu metal scene to emerge from its depths. This album never saw (and most likely never will see) public release, as n0ne of the band members have one of the 1000 original distributed CDs, but it's legacy is ever-present in what followed. Whether it be the CD's barcode (742617000027) being the title of the intro track on the band's self titled, or the tracks "Slipknot," "Tattered and Torn," "Only One," and a few others being finished and repurposed for later works, the influence of Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. lives on.
-Sam Owens
- The End, So Far (2022)
When you’ve reached The End, So Far, what is there left to say? By 2022, Slipknot had built themselves up as titans of modern metal, a legacy outfit casting a huge masked profile over the scene. At a certain angle, one could make the case for this album as a victory lap for the band.
In reality, the results are more mixed.
The End, So Far flaunts some experimentation for the Knot, with the synth work and vocal inflections giving them a whole new flair. Along with that, however, comes the squirming in your seat when you’re halfway through another slow dirge powered by a polished-to-unrecognizable guitar riff and lyrics that are characteristically over their head with an arbitrary selection of vocabulary words.
Tracks like “The Dying Song (Time to Sing)” and “H377” kick things back into high gear in a bid for your interest, and some of the more out-there moments like “Hive Mind” can occasionally gesture to some bigger ideas. Throughout the whole record, Sid Wilson’s wicked work on the turntables remains a real highlight.
Ultimately, however, this is less of a slept-on gem and more an evolving band at the end of their record deal trying to pull the cord one last time but falling a little short of getting the engine started.
-Charlotte King
- .5: The Gray Chapter (2014)
While .5: The Gray Chapter contains beloved songs like “The Negative One” or “The Devil in I,” it falls short when compared to its chronological predecessors both musically and from a sales standpoint. The Gray Chapter is the first album to not feature bassist Paul Gray and drummer Joey Jordison, two key members on building the band’s unique sound. As a result, this fifth studio album while stylistically is a continuation of the bands previously stablished pathway and had a critical reception similar to its predecessor All Hope is Gone, hasn’t performed that well against the test of time and is not as loved by both the fans and the agenda.
-Alvaro Xerom
- We Are Not Your Kind (2019)
Their most ambitious and experimental album up to that point, We Are Not Your Kind was bound to leave some fans scratching their heads. (It's placement on the lower half of this list would seem to corroborate this.) The band has always dabbled in the odd sonic surprise here and there, but this album is where those experimental impulses take center stage.
Inspired by groups like Pink Floyd and the Beatles, at one point the record was going to be a double-album. Perhaps what's most surprising is how they take big swings straight out of the Classic Rock playbook—"Unsainted" has a choir! Like the one in "You Can't Always Get What You Want"!—and make them work to their own ends. Co-produced by Greg Fidelman, the album finds several moments to forefront atmosphere and mood rather than aggression and pummeling guitars. And yet there's a strange, dark to proceedings. Note how the breakdown in "Unsainted" is a clear evolution of the same section from the "Eyeless." The dark keyboard-driven lullaby "My Pain," wouldn't exist without the groundwork laid by something like opening half of "Gently." Even the funky, gothic "Spiders" with its lurching 7/8 bass and piano figure, finds its earliest antecedents in "Do Nothing/Bitchslap" from Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. even as it twists into sections that wouldn't seem out of place on a Queens of the Stone Age or Brian Eno record.
At the same time, the band can still be as aggressive and heavy as ever. When tracks like the aforementioned "Unsainted," "Nero Forte," and "Red Flag" hit, they're as crushing—and catchy—as anything on the band's self-titled debut and Iowa. The production's cleaner, but all the better to marvel at the myriad textures and shades of black the band conjures.
Even if the quality occasionally dipped, this would still be a key moment in their discography for how it redefined what a Slipknot album could sound like. Fortunately, there's not a bad song on here. Make no mistake: this is a good album. Possibly a great one. If you're in the right (read: adventurous) mood, this is a no-skip album. Elements from every stage of their career are present, but integrated into what is, arguably, their most accomplished collection of songs. If nothing else, this is album has "Solway Firth." Not just one of the best song the band has ever written, it's one of their most beautiful. The band's music has long belied an oddly tuneful musicality; fans willing to give this record a(nother) chance will see just how refreshing it is to hear that quality surfacing.
-Drew Davis
- Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses (2004)
This album is divisive in many ways, which may explain its middle-of-the-road placement on this list. On one hand, it gave the band their first Grammy for "Before I Forget," which also featured in the setlist for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. It had guitar solos on songs such as "Vermilion," showing the chops of Jim Root and Mick Thompson beyond the drop-tuned chugging and death metal elements. On the other hand, it is the only album not to bear the "Parental Advisory" sticker, and after Iowa, had a song with the line "I wanna slit your throat and fuck the wound," that's quite a pivot. It also bore a ballad in "Vermilion, Pt. 2," which walked so the radio smash "Snuff" could run.
To me, this album is the RuPaul's Drag Race season seven of the Slipknot catalog. Is it fondly remembered? Yes, but many will say the earlier work is better. But it was a transitional effort. Shawn Crahan described this album as "we're healing," whereas albums one and two were fun and masochistic, respectively. Things were getting better for the band, and they were turning a corner from nihilistic nine to a stalwart metal band that was locking in and wanting to be there for the long haul after all.
-Lucia Z. Liner
- All Hope Is Gone (2008)
This album was truly a gamechanger for me personally, as nothing stirred me up more than "Psychosocial" and the pummeling "Butcher's Hook." While I can understand some folks' hesitance to embrace this album, as it was another step in a more mainstream direction, but damn if these guys didn't lock in for this one. Songs like "Gematria (The Killing Name)" brought the elements of death metal that hadn't been as prominent since their debut LP, while songs like "Dead Memories" brought a surprising radio-ready sound to the band.
Slipknot isn't a band known for power ballads, but between that song and "Snuff," the wider rock audience was better able to embrace the band's work. In some respect, it's like becoming a fan of Peter Jackson's work with Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, then realizing that he made schlocky splatter films in his native New Zealand well before he was tapped to take on Tolkien. All Hope is Gone topped nine different charts, went Platinum in the States, another Grammy nomination, and serves as the last hurrah for the composition of the OGs, Donnie Steele and Anders Colsefini notwithstanding.
-Lucia Z. Liner
- Iowa (2001)
That cover. We’re pushed in too close, past orientation, the overcranked contrast eye-bruising. The goat’s head fills the frame, all curve and shape, that unholy sideways pupil holding the camera, waiting for a fistful of flax, or the captive bolt. We have a word to go with it, Iowa, but Iowa is a place that’s all sky and space, and this—this is captivity, compression, a forehead against a mirror.
Of all the records in the nu metal canon, Iowa might be the one as famous for its creation myth as it is for its sound. As the legend goes, the record was hell to make. Chief songwriters Joey Jordison and Paul Gray going straight from relentless touring for the debut into writing the follow-up, burning themselves like gas to get the process going while the rest of the band took a break, vocalist Corey Taylor’s growing alcoholism, producer Ross Robinson’s fractured spine, the pain driving his work, his work driving the band, the band, strung out from drugs, from the road, from too-fast success, hating each other and everyone involved with them. The first record had been a hit, had dragged the band out of blue collar Midwestern drear and onto stages around the world, and expectations were smothering. “There was nothing happy about Iowa,” Taylor has said. Shawn “Clown” Crahan: “I wanted to kill myself”.
Slipknot is the sound of a band so hungry they’re chewing on the record; it’s frantic, Jordison outrunning the band and the band outrunning itself, its beautiful rawness a reflection of a group encountering itself for the first time. Iowa is the sound of a band that went on the road and came back a weapon. It takes skill to transform pain into power, to weld instead of break. Iowa is Slipknot, beaten into a blade.
Every performance is protean, but as with Slipknot, it’s Jordison’s drumming that is the heart of the record. It’s a frenzied, incredibly emotional performance, like he’s literally fighting the songs; it reminds me of Brann Dailor’s possessed work on Mastodon’s Remission from the following year, or Converge’s Jacob Bannon shrieking himself into ribbons on Jane Doe, which came out a week after Iowa. Both those records are wild with grief, and the sort of super-tonal similarity to Iowa for me speaks volumes about where Slipknot were at on this record. I’ve gone this long without naming a single song, and I won’t; Iowa is a volume, meant to be drunk in a single pull, a document of a band putting their heads through the mirror and building glory out of the pieces.
-Josh Rioux
- Slipknot (1999)
What a way to introduce yourselves to the world.
Slipknot was produced by the godfather of nu metal, Ross Robinson, who earned that nickname because he had discovered other powerhouses of the genre such as Korn and Limp Bizkit. The album was released on June 29, right in the middle of the band playing that year's Ozzfest tour, which greatly increased their exposure to a wider audience. They were able to promote their debut album, and boy did that tour help jumpstart their careers. Not even a full year later, on May 2, 2000, Slipknot was certified platinum by the RIAA, marking the first album by Roadrunner Records to achieve that status. Just a few years later, on February 5th, 2005, it would become certified double platinum. To this day, it remains the band's best-selling effort. "Wait and Bleed" was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards, but was ultimately defeated at the hands of "Elite" by Deftones. Still, it's very impressive to be nominated for a Grammy so early on in their career.
The Iowan natives were very influenced by the avant-garde metal band Fantômas during the making of this album, as well as genres including death metal, thrash metal, and speed metal. This is evident especially with the drumming of Joey Jordison, who recorded all of his drum parts in only three days. Having eight different instruments clashing with one another, including turntables, samples, and even a beer keg, provided a deeply layered and complicated sound that hadn't been seen in the mainstream before. The chaotic and aggressive musicianship make a complementary backdrop for topics such as anger, hatred, abandonment, and violence that are explored in the lyrical content, mainly composed by frontman Corey Taylor, with added contributions from the other band members. It's no surprise that attempting to combine this myriad of musical elements resulted in a tumultuous recording process, with Robinson even throwing a potted plant at Jordison at one point.
Many a fan and metal band have cited Slipknot as one of the most influential and best metal albums of all time, even outside of the nu metal genre. Hell, even The Agenda already ranked it number one out of the 100 greatest nu metal albums of all time. It is a record that is often imitated, but hasn't been duplicated. The raw emotion and brash musical styling of all nine band members coming together on Slipknot was like lightning in a bottle. There is a reason this album has withstood the test of time, remaining beloved by Maggots whether they've been a fan since the beginning or only recently. Slipknot is the perfect amalgamation of every aspect that we love about nu metal, from Taylor spitting out sick bars (seriously, we don't talk enough about how impressive of a rapper he is), which quickly transition to brash screaming, groovy basslines, funky turntable scratching, downtuned guitars, and relatable angsty lyrics ("Fuck it all, fuck this world, fuck everything that you stand for").
This record proved that Slipknot couldn't be killed because they were already inside of us for life.
-Alex Cross
