Yet the fire that had been re-lit in their bellies fuelled crushing metal stompers such as Solway Firth with an intensity that hadn’t been there for years.
The Slipknot of 2019 came with a greater grasp of melody than ever, with a wider pool of influences – see the gothic, industrial crawl of the excellent Spiders for evidence. Once the band released the album’s first single Unsainted it was clear that they had something special on their hands. This doesn’t just feel like a return to form, it feels like a brand-new chapter and a pointer to what Slipknot can still achieve. But they certainly silenced the doubters with We Are Not Your Kind. You’d be forgiven for believing that, for all their continued success and continually great live shows, Slipknot were never going to scale the heights of their earliest material as their sixth album came over the horizon at the start of 2019. That aside, Vol.3 still out-punches most metal band’s best efforts. If there is a criticism then it would be the fact that, once again, at just over an hour it lags towards the end. For proof, there’s the inhumanly huge Duality, which might just be their definitive festival rousing song, but it’s also on tracks like Prelude 3.0 and Circle, which lean on the right side of melodic without losing any of the band's famous intensity. This is a genuinely great collection of songs, and it’s the place where Slipknot began to really branch out and become better songwriters. So, it’s by no means a failure of Vol.3 that it finds itself at this place in our countdown. It’s not easy having to follow up two genuinely groundbreaking albums, but that’s the position that Slipknot found themselves in heading in to the recording of their third effort.
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