It’s 21 years since Slipknot blazed out of Iowa with their eponymous debut album and a striking USP. Their horror masks tapped into the movie-viewing habits of their soon-to-be enormous audience, while their bleak, nihilistic lyrics tapped into widespread feelings of social unease, isolation, disquiet and rage. The brutal music channelled what late rock critic Lester Bangs called “the sacred power of horrible noise”: a mix of heavy metal, pummelling blast beats, elements of rap plus vintage Killing Joke and Nine Inch Nails – all sounding as if they were being put through an industrial grinder. It proved not just a recipe for world domination – they became very big, very quickly – but endurance. Last year’s chart-topping sixth album, We Are Not Your Kind, received some of the best reviews of their career.
It has, however, been a bumpy ride. The music has been crassly linked to violent incidents, despite Slipknot’s vocal opposition to America’s gun culture. They remain a nine-piece, but only clown-masked percussionist Shawn Crahan (also a film director) survives from the original 1995 lineup, as members have been lost to lawsuits, a neurological disease, sackings, religious differences and an overdose (founding bassist Paul Gray died in 2010). Somehow it has all been grist to their furious mill.
Opener Unsainted, from We Are Not Your Kind, explains their longevity. It’s brutally quintessential but also cleverly rebooted Slipknot, and the combination of growling frontman Corey Taylor and a (recorded) ghostly children’s choir singing, “I’ll never kill myself to save my soul” is eerily uplifting.
The band’s lineup remains idiosyncratic, too: a frontman, three guitarists, a keyboard player, DJ, powerhouse drummer Jay Weinberg (the son of fabled Bruce Springsteen sticksman, Max) and two percussionists beating huge stacks of what look like luminous oil drums. Underpinning the fury is solid, skilled musicianship and trusted metal tropes: killer riffs, wailing solos and choruses that hit home with packed arenas, especially on bellow-along angry anthems Duality and Surfacing.
The band are also thrillingly theatrical. Taylor’s horror mask and spattered outfit make him look as if he has stepped straight from the set of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There are fire-shooting guitars, computer graphics, conveyor belts and the two percussionists double as demonic clowns and cheerleaders. Taylor, 46, rages convincingly but is also an incorrigible showman, insisting Manchester is “one of my favourite cities in the fuckin’ world”. He said something similar in Dublin.
Still, a career-spanning setlist leaves no fan disappointed as thousands of the so-called “maggots” punch the air to songs from the debut and seminal follow-up, Iowa, and more from We Are Not Your Kind. The splendid Neo Forte rocks darkly, while the innovative Solway Firth takes the sound somewhere brooding and haunting, with Gary Numan synths.
Between songs, Taylor offers a glimpse of the human behind the mask, commenting on the shared “isolation” that connects his band with so many people, and touchingly referring to “the craziness in the world”: “That madness touches us but isn’t us. This is us!” Taylor roars again as band and air-punching audience unite against the world’s insanity with the defiant misanthropy of People = Shit, its title helpfully, mischievously written in huge letters above the stage.
• At Newcastle Arena, 17 January. Then touring.
