Slipknot have released their sixth album, We Are Not Your Kind, which follows 2013’s .5: The Gray Chapter and sees the band coming closer than ever before to having made a concept record.

The 14-track title was preceded by the singles "“Unsainted," "Solway Firth" and "Birth of the Cruel" and arrives amid the band’s Slipknot Roadshow North American tour.

You can listen to the album in full via Apple Music or Spotify, below:

 

“To be honest, we were just trying to make an album,” frontman Corey Taylor told Loudwire in a new interview, after he was asked if We Are Not Your Kind is a concept album. “The narrative really came from me working my way through the repercussions of a really toxic relationship. … I didn’t realize there was a linear message going on until we all sat down and listened to it and that made it feel like a story. Even Clown [Crahan] said, ‘I’m listening to this like it’s a concept album.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but it’s not.’ It’s really weird. It’s one of those things where it’s accidentally linear, but it really wasn’t supposed to be weird in a Tarantino sense.”

Explaining the return of a certain vitality to their music, he said: “We walked in realizing that we had carte blanche again; we could do whatever we wanted. It was the same vibe we had with Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses. And bringing that same kind of energy in really meant that we could go anywhere with the music and as long as we were happy with it, we knew it was gonna be fuckin’ awesome.”

He added: “We were all very much of the mindset where we went, ‘Okay, no one’s trying to force us into a certain mindset or a certain direction. Let’s get back to where we were. Let’s get back to that point where we can craft these amazing moments and knit them together with these heavy, heavy songs – these frenetic fucking bursts of energy. And let’s draw on all of these influences that we’ve had for so long and that we hinted at with Vol. 3 but that we’ve never been able to let really shine and let them off the chain. I feel like this album follows that spirit even more than Vol. 3. I think Vol. 3 has some great songs on it and it has a wider field, while We Are Not Your Kind is just so fuckin’ dark that it’s compelling in a way that Vol. 3 never was.”

 

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