Produced by SlipKnot and Ross Robinson at Sound City Studios and Sound Image, Van Nuys, LA
Engineered by Mike Fraser
Mixed by Andy Wallace, Steve Sisco, and Joey Jordison
Mastered by George Marino
SlipKnot ended up in a bad place after touring for their debut. Much like Jonathan Davis before them, they became overwhelmed by their newfound fame and unsure of how to deal with it. All of that confusion came out in their sophomore album, Iowa, named after their much-hated home state. Clown told Kerrang in 2012: ‘Recording Iowa was fucking hell. I wanted to kill myself. There was drugs, bitches, rock ’n’ roll, all that shit. People expected so much of us then. ‘People = Shit’ was our way of saying, ‘Fuck off and leave us alone.’… …When we did Iowa, we hated each other. We hated the world; the world hated us.’ Taylor agreed: ‘There was nothing happy about Iowa. All of a sudden we were these metal stars and we weren’t really planning for it… We’d all got caught up in the lifestyle and the problems that come with that. A darkness set in at the beginning of Iowa that none of us quite recognised.’
Jordison told Revolver in 2018: ‘We discovered that doing a Slipknot record is fucking prison. You’re trapped until it’s done. You’re fucked. I’m in a band with the best musicians in the fucking world. I’m so blessed. But at the same time, when we get together — even though we have so much love for each other — we fuckin’ want to kill each other. And that’s where some things got out of control. When we did Iowa, it was a very dark time for the band. Some of our strongest and most meaningful songs are on that record, but we were all on drugs and drunk and it sucked.’ Taylor added: ‘I don’t know if it was jealousy or if it was just insecurity; ‘Am I pulling my weight? Is this person getting more attention than me?’ It was just dark, and it really spit in the face of everything the band tried to accomplish on the first album.’
The band had agreed to remain sober for the creation of their debut, but that went entirely out the window here — now they were partying, clubbing, and cheating on their girlfriends. Fehn: ‘We had all worked really hard before, but now we’re partying harder and we got a little bit of pocket change and we can afford certain drugs that we couldn’t before. It got weird and I didn’t think we were going to be able to hold it together.’ Part of that weirdness resulted from the fact that their manager was stealing from them and successfully attempting to create rifts in the band as a distraction. Tensions mounted, and the guitarists became reclusive and separated themselves from the rest of the band whenever possible.
They returned to Ross Robinson for this album. For Robinson to produce a nu metal record during his post-hardcore period, it had to be extreme — the most extreme album he’d ever worked on, as he told Metal-is.com: ‘The next album is gonna be a complete distraction. We’re gonna do it as heavy, as radical and as ridiculous as possible.’ Indeed, the hip-hop influences of their debut are dialed way down in favor of more influence from extreme metal. The band was evidently told by their label to create a more singles-oriented album, but they rejected that and opted to do exactly the opposite. (Of course, they ended up giving into that suggestion on their next record, but that’s another story.)
Taylor: ‘Working with Ross was intense as shit. We did 12 songs the first night we were there and the whole time he is throwing potted plants at us.’ Robinson described his attempts to elicit more feeling from Clown during these sessions: ‘I grabbed one of the candles and I threw it against the wall as hard as I could and wax went across his song [sic?] and he started screaming into the floor. And the next take was so good.’ Robinson tortured himself, as well, putting ‘all of his pain into the album’: ‘I broke my back in a bike accident, which was really perfect for the album because Slipknot were experiencing huge success and going out every night and not showing up in the studio on time. And as soon as I broke my back motocrossing, I took one day off and showed up the next day and I was in so much pain. I just went, “Look, motherfuckers, I’m showing up. Let’s get it the fuck on.” That seemed to work.’
The record’s minute long intro track, ‘[515]’, features layered screams of pain from DJ Sid Wilson. Clown recalls: ‘Best time for me was when Sid was a little out of control, wouldn’t get his shit down. He’s like, “I gotta go. My grandfather’s dying. I gotta get there. Shit’s going on.” Grandpa dies. Didn’t get there. Sid shows up. But we see he’s hurting. He gets in [the recording booth]. They start the song. He starts singing. Next thing you know the song’s done, he has a breakdown and that’s “(515)”. That’s all Sid. Just gone. I come in the next day, Ross is weeping. Puts his arms around me. “I’ve been waiting for you, Clown. You’re one of the few people that’s gonna understand this. This is my favorite part of the record. It’s the realest part of the record.” It was Sid having a breakdown from all the pain in this thing called Slipknot.’
Despite all of their talk of darkness, pain, and extremity, Iowa is a shinier record than their debut — the production is a lot more polished thanks to engineer Mike Fraser (who had just worked with Robinson on Amen’s sophomore album). To me, it lacks a lot of the vibe that made their first album work. It’s got a sharp high end and it’s more compressed, making it feel more distant, more contained, less dark, and somehow less colorful. It also ironically feels muddier, with the role of the auxiliary players diminished in the mix because it’s simply harder to hear what’s going on. Fraser seems like an odd match for this band, given that most of his work has been with acts like AC/DC, Aerosmith, Van Halen, and Metallica (on Load and Reload). I generally enjoy Andy Wallace’s mixes, but his mix here clearly contributes to this issue, as well. The production simply isn’t satisfying to listen to.
This brings us to another problem — the album is longer, heavier, and less dynamic than their debut, clocking in at 66min, which is simply too long for such an extreme record. Heaviness only continues to feel heavy with contrast — your ear adjusts to relentlessly heaviness quickly, so it stops feeling so heavy after a while, which is exactly what happens here (plus it’s easy for the listener to just run out of energy). The album is once again frontloaded. It does undeniably pummel you into the ground and make you want to run around and wreck stuff for its first half, but the problem of having a weaker back half feels much bigger here than it did on their debut. Unlike their debut, it doesn’t work as an ear candy headphones record, and since there are fewer dynamic moments to keep things fresh, it just gets monotonous and way overstays its welcome.
That isn’t to say there are no dynamics on this record - the late album highlight ‘Skin Ticket’ has a decent amount of dynamic and tempo variation, and ‘The Shape’ at least has slightly quieter verses. The most dynamic tracks are the two songs the band reworked from their M.F.K.R. demo. Clown’s ‘Gently’ comes right in the middle of the record, giving your ears a break at just the right time - after getting pummeled for 5 songs, we finally get a moody slow build that starts out quiet, if still tense. It builds to an explosive heavy climax, of course, but the heaviness feels reinvigorated after the break.
The other really dynamic track is the closing title song, which is a rework of M.F.K.R.’s closing track, ‘Killers are Quiet’. It’s been extended from its already excruciating 10.5min runtime to a whopping 15min, with the Tool influence dialed up. The problem is that this band is not Tool, and they don’t know how to be them. All of the song’s material has already been introduced and driven into the ground before the first third of the track is over - it’s intensely repetitive, aiming for hypnosis but missing. Granted, it’s the one song on the album where the sound design and auxiliary members are really allowed to shine, so there’s some fun ambience behind the repetitive riffs - but that’s not enough to save it from tedium, especially since there’s not a single chord change in the song’s entire duration.
Taylor recorded the song naked, cutting himself with broken glass and vomiting all over himself. The song banks on Taylor’s vocal performance to make it work, but unfortunately it feels as overblown as its recording method. It’s sung through the eyes of a serial killer sitting with a woman’s corpse, with lyrics like ‘All I want is to covet you all. You belong to me. I WILL KILL YOU TO LOVE YOU.’ It mostly feels like a tryhard attempt at being edgelordy that fell flat on its face, which brings me to my other issue with this record - a lot of it feels more mired in edginess than their previous album. Taylor even admitted the pointlessness of what was being expressed: ‘When I was doing the [self-titled] album I was letting so much go and it felt good. Doing Iowa, I wasn't letting anything go. It was just rage for the sake of rage. It was just gnarly and I was so fuckin' unhappy.’
They began appropriating death and black metal imagery, putting a goat on the album cover and creating a ‘nonagram’ logo to represent the 9 members — a lazy and empty attempt at making themselves seem scary, given that these guys are certainly not satanists. Taylor wrote a higher percentage of the lyrics this time around, which resulted in less sloganeering but more shock value. The opening lyric of ‘Disasterpiece’ is really emblematic of this - ‘I WANNA SLIT YOUR THROAT AND FUCK THE WOUND / WANNA PUSH MY FACE IN AND FEEL THE SWOON’. I guess this is supposed to be his song about bullying, following in the footsteps of Korn’s ‘Faget’, but the lyrics are too vague and over the top to resonate.
Then there’s the chorus of ‘The Heretic Anthem’ - ‘IF YOU’RE 555, THEN I’M 666!’ Ok, 555 is a ‘number of the angels’, so it’s not as random as it initially sounds - but does that make it any less dumb? And that’s not even the dumbest part of the song, which is basically a declaration of war against pop music: ‘I'm a popstar threat and I'm not dead yet / Got a super dread bet with an angel drug head / Like a dead beat winner, I wanna be a sinner / An idolized bang for the industry killer.’ Oof. Lines like ‘It's evil sonic, it's pornoholic’ will leave you wondering if you accidentally wandered into a Rob Zombie album.
My least favorite bit is probably the chorus of ‘Everything Ends’ - ‘You are wrong, fucked, and overrated / I think I’m gonna be sick and it’s your fault / This is the end of everything / You are the end of everything / I haven’t slept since I woke up and found my whole life was a lie, motherfucker’ is delivered over a tremolo picked riff. It’s kind of a shame, as it seems like he really had something to say here: ‘It’s about the last time I tried to commit suicide, and more to the point, the first day I figured out what life was all about. It’s about the last day in a life I don’t want to remember and about the first day in a life that I am living right now.’ The song otherwise features one of the best riffs on the album and a great verse groove, but that chorus is a real vibe-killer.
Part of the issue is Taylor’s vocal delivery. He’s still trying to give it his all here, but the wear on his voice is already showing. A lot of his screams on this record are more low pitched and guttural, and his voice sounds tired in that range. It’s clear that he didn’t have any real technique going into this, so extensively touring did some damage. His smoking and drinking habits also weren’t helping. Despite this, he screams more than he did on their debut (the only rapping is in the verses of ‘I Am Hated’, and doesn’t do a whole lot of singing). This contributes to the general sense that the band is trying to go even harder than they did on their first record, but simply don’t have it in them.
Nonetheless, there’s still plenty to enjoy here. If you’re looking for something to rage along to, the first 8 tracks will get the job done extremely well in spite of the cringe moments. The singles on this record are solid, featuring some of the only sung choruses on the record. The verses of ‘My Plague’ are nice and heavy, and the serpentine riff which opens ‘Left Behind’ is especially pleasing. ‘People = Shit’ delivers everything you’d want from a song with that title — there’s no doubt that many people have gotten hurt while moshing to its chorus. ‘Disasterpiece’ opens with more squealing guitar noises and a copy of the ‘Surfacing’ groove, but reaches borderline death metal territory by the bridge. It’s not as inspired or memorable as it wants to be, but it gets the job done and features a solid climax.
Jordison may insist that ‘Iowa, even more than the first record, was the album we really wanted to make’, but to me it simply does not have the magic that their debut had. It also didn’t sell as well as their debut, but this was partly the result of many media outlets deciding they didn’t feel it was appropriate to play aggressive metal songs after 9/11 (the album came out on 8/28/01), and so a number of bands got blacklisted for MTV and radio play. Nonetheless, Iowa is undeniably better than everything that followed it. The band was at least fighting the tide by making an extreme album at a time when nu metal was quickly becoming increasingly mainstream and sanitized. Granted, they submitted to that trend with their third record — and too late, as they’d just missed the boat by 2004. As such, Iowa feels like the first hint of the band’s impending downward slide.
Part of that downhill slide was due to a shifting writing team. Their debut was almost entirely written by Jordison, Gray, Clown, and Taylor, but the music here is attributed to the entire band (sans Taylor, who only wrote lyrics at this point). Guitarist Jim Root (Taylor’s bandmate in Stone Sour) was creatively contributing to the band for the first time here, signaling the beginning of a shift that was going to take place over their next several albums. By the time the band got to their 5th record, after Gray had died and Jordison had been ejected from the band, Taylor and Root became the band’s primary writers. SlipKnot essentially morphed into an entirely different creative force, with only Clown in common.
Most fans view Iowa as the band’s peak. The band has been advertising each new record as ‘Iowa levels of heavy’ for some time now, but they always fail to live up to that promise. They finally stopped doing this with their most recent album, The End So Far. Taylor complained about this to NME in 2022 in his typical manner: ‘One of the problems about writing one of the heaviest fucking albums of all time is that people just expect you to do that over and over. Well, fuck, that’s so boring. If we had done that, we wouldn’t be where we are today, 100 per cent. You also have to remember a large part of the population are also people who have created petitions against every Batman that has ever been fucking cast in a movie, and they’ve always been wrong. Who’s really right here? You fucking idiots, sometimes you just need to shut the fuck up and listen to what we give you.’
As is evident in that quote, Taylor’s rage has not subsided in the past two decades. ‘To this day, my anger can get away from me.’ His hatred for the band’s home state continues unabated, as he told the Zach Sang show in 2023: ‘We were judged for so fucking long about who we were, I mean we came from The Fringe and what we represented was something that, to do this day. There are a lot of people in Iowa that are very ashamed of the fact that Slipknot comes from there and it’s because of this newfound Resurgence and conservative bullshit… There’s a lot of fucking dicks who still live in Des Moines, Iowa, that are so mad. I know dudes that I’ve known for 30 years, I run into them and they side-eye me hard. There’s so many bitter pricks in that goddamn town…’
Taylor may still be just as angry as he always was, but how many times can you express the same rage and have it still feel fresh? Perhaps that’s why Iowa, for all the excitement of its first half hour, feels a bit forced to me. The band had already said everything they had to say on their first record. Many artists have expressed how the touring lifestyle can interfere with their personal growth and maturation, and the artistic result of that is often that touring artists are unable to change enough to find new things to express. Instead, the same sentiments get repeated ad infinitum, with a bit less conviction each time — perhaps with a new producer, or small detours into new musical styles. In the case of bands who achieved some level of success, like many in the nu metal scene, their popularity and relevance tends to dwindle with these diminishing returns.
The same was true of the scene at large — nu metal was a genre which simply could not grow up. By 2001, it had said everything it had to say. Iowa ended up being the last widely relevant nu metal album that Robinson was involved with. It was his final attempt at reclaiming the genre he’d guided into existence from the industry machine which had co-opted and commercialized it. Iowa was nu metal’s last dying scream, emitted from inside the mouth of the beast a mere second before the jaws slammed shut.
