Rating: 8 / 10 Stars
SLIPKNOT is: Corey Taylor (Vocals), Mick Thomson (Guitars), Jim Root (Guitars), Alessandro “V-Man” Venturella (Bass), Sid Wilson (Turntables), Shawn “Clown” Crahan (Percussion), Michael Pfaff (Percussion), Jay Weinberg (Drums), and Craig Jones (Samples and Media)
REVIEW – There is something beautifully unstable about an album title like The End, So Far. In the hands of a lesser band, it might sound like an overdramatic farewell, a marketing tease dressed in apocalyptic clothing. In the hands of SLIPKNOT, it feels more like a warning from inside a collapsing machine. Not the end. Not exactly. The end, so far. A threshold. A rupture. A line scratched into concrete by a band that has spent its entire career turning trauma, chaos, grief, rage, and spectacle into something communal enough to fill arenas and still ugly enough to make those arenas feel unsafe.
Set to arrive September 30, 2022, through Roadrunner Records, The End, So Far follows 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind, a record that pushed SLIPKNOT deeper into atmosphere, experimentation, and emotional extremity without sacrificing the blunt-force violence that made them one of heavy music’s most improbable mainstream institutions. The question hovering over this new album is not whether SLIPKNOT can still sound heavy. That has never really been in doubt. The more interesting question is how much further they can stretch the definition of what SLIPKNOT is before the shape finally breaks.
Corey Taylor has described this album as another extension of boundaries, a move into territory the listener has never been before while still feeling like something the band can inhabit honestly. That distinction matters. SLIPKNOT’s evolution has never been about polish for polish’s sake. At their best, they do not experiment to impress. They experiment because the old wounds keep changing shape, and the music has to mutate if it wants to keep up.
The pre-release singles already suggest a band uninterested in simply repeating the formulas that made them infamous. “The Chapeltown Rag” arrived like a panic attack inside the internet age, a track built from information sickness, media rot, digital outrage, and the impossible speed of modern disgust. It is jagged, overloaded, and venomous, but what makes it work is the sense that SLIPKNOT are not standing outside the chaos pointing fingers. They sound trapped inside it too. The song is not just an accusation. It is contamination.
“The Dying Song (Time to Sing)” sharpens that chaos into something more anthemic, though “anthemic” in SLIPKNOT’s world never means clean. It means thousands of voices screaming from the same wound. The title alone captures the band’s strange genius: death turned into participation, collapse turned into ritual, extinction given a chorus. Taylor sounds feral and commanding, but beneath the fury is something almost ceremonial. SLIPKNOT have always understood that the crowd is not separate from the music. The crowd is part of the exorcism.
Then there is “Yen,” one of the most fascinating glimpses into what The End, So Far may become. It is seductive in a sickly way, built around longing, obsession, devotion, and the kind of desire that feels less like love than possession. SLIPKNOT have always had a romantic darkness buried beneath the violence, but “Yen” brings that impulse closer to the surface. It does not bludgeon so much as stalk. It breathes hotly at the back of the neck. The heaviness comes not from speed or brutality alone, but from the realization that craving can become its own form of self-destruction.
If those singles are the entry points, the full track listing suggests something even stranger and more fractured. “Adderall” opens the album, and even its title feels like a deliberate refusal of expectation. SLIPKNOT could have begun with the obvious detonation, the kind of opening assault that tells longtime fans exactly where they are. Instead, “Adderall” promises unease, dependency, acceleration, numbness, focus, and disassociation all at once. For a band so often defined by eruption, starting with psychological instability rather than simple violence would be a bold and fitting move.
From there, “The Dying Song (Time to Sing)” and “The Chapeltown Rag” appear ready to pull the album back into the hostile bloodstream of modern SLIPKNOT: blast, grind, scream, convulse, repeat until the body recognizes the rhythm of its own panic. But The End, So Far does not seem designed as a straight-line assault. It looks more like a map of pressure points, each song pressing on a different bruise.
“Hive Mind” is a title that belongs naturally inside SLIPKNOT’s mythology. The band have always built community from alienation, but they have also been deeply suspicious of systems that swallow individuality. A hive mind can be comfort or prison. It can be congregation or control. SLIPKNOT’s fanbase, the Maggots, has long functioned like a wounded family, a gathering place for those who felt too angry, too damaged, too strange, or too invisible to belong elsewhere. But SLIPKNOT also know the danger of collective rage when it becomes directionless, manipulated, or self-consuming. A song with this title has the potential to strike directly at that tension.
“Warranty” suggests something colder, more transactional. SLIPKNOThave written often about bodies as products, pain as currency, anger as commodity, and identity as something sold back to the broken by the very systems that broke them. A warranty is corporate comfort language. It promises repair, replacement, coverage, protection. In SLIPKNOT’s hands, the word becomes grotesque. What happens when human beings are treated like defective machinery? What happens when suffering is packaged, branded, guaranteed, and resold?
“Medicine for the Dead” sounds like a funeral rite performed too late. It is a beautiful and terrible title, the kind that captures SLIPKNOT’s long-standing obsession with grief that refuses to stay buried. Death in this band’s music is rarely peaceful. It is active. It scratches at the floorboards. It demands explanation. The phrase suggests treatment after the point of rescue, care offered when the patient is already gone, a world so broken it keeps prescribing remedies to corpses.
“Acidic” carries the promise of corrosion. SLIPKNOT’s sound has always had an acidic function. It strips away varnish. It eats through polite surfaces. It exposes what people try to seal beneath habit, performance, denial, or numbness. Whether this track leans into groove, atmosphere, or something more poisonous and slow-burning, its title fits the album’s larger sense of erosion. This is not destruction by explosion alone. Sometimes the end arrives through gradual chemical breakdown.
“Heirloom” may be one of the most revealing titles on the record. SLIPKNOT are a band obsessed with inheritance even when they do not state it plainly. Trauma is an heirloom. Rage is an heirloom. Addiction, shame, grief, violence, survival, and silence all pass from hand to hand, generation to generation, mask to mask. An heirloom is supposed to be precious, but it can also be cursed. That contradiction feels tailor-made for SLIPKNOT, a band that has built an empire out of the things people are told to hide.
“H377” looks like hell rendered through corrupted code, and that visual distortion feels entirely appropriate for this era. SLIPKNOT’s hell has never been purely biblical. It is psychological, technological, social, bodily. It is the feed, the hospital room, the addiction cycle, the empty house, the crowd crush, the bad memory, the mirror. By turning “hell” into something stylized and almost digital, the title suggests ancient suffering translated through modern machinery.
“De Sade” brings with it the shadow of cruelty, pleasure, domination, and pain transformed into philosophy. SLIPKNOT do not need literary references to understand the body as a battlefield, but the title suggests an exploration of suffering as appetite, intimacy as violence, and control as a kind of performance. That is fertile ground for a band that has always blurred the line between punishment and release.
Finally, “Finale” closes the album, and on a record titled The End, So Far, that word carries enormous weight. But SLIPKNOT finales are not tidy curtain calls. They are aftermaths. They are rooms filled with smoke after the machinery has burned itself alive. A finale here does not necessarily mean resolution. It may mean inventory: what survived, what was lost, what can no longer continue, and what kind of monster crawls out next.
The fascinating thing about The End, So Far is that it appears to stand between conclusion and transformation. SLIPKNOT are no longer the same band that erupted out of Iowa in 1999, but they have also never become a softened legacy act content to reenact old violence for nostalgia’s sake. Every era has altered them. Death altered them. Lineup changes altered them. Sobriety, age, grief, fame, expectation, and exhaustion altered them. The masks changed because the people beneath them changed. That is not betrayal. That is survival.
The band’s mainstream position remains one of heavy music’s great impossibilities. SLIPKNOT are too abrasive, too grotesque, too emotionally diseased, and too sonically unstable to belong comfortably inside the mainstream, yet they have forced the mainstream to accommodate them anyway. They are not simply a metal band that got big. They are a hostile environment that millions of people chose to enter because it told the truth about feelings polite culture wanted sanitized.
That truth is still the band’s greatest weapon. Corey Taylor remains one of modern metal’s most volatile frontmen because he can sound like a preacher, a patient, a survivor, a tyrant, and a wounded child in the same breath. Mick Thomson and Jim Root continue to give SLIPKNOT its serrated architecture, guitars that can become machinery, weather, or blunt trauma depending on the song’s needs. Alessandro Venturella anchors the low end with pressure and movement, while Jay Weinberg’s drumming brings a furious athleticism to the band’s modern incarnation. Sid Wilson and Craig Jones remain essential to the band’s sense of electronic intrusion and fractured atmosphere, while Shawn Crahan and Michael Pfaff turn percussion into ritual impact, reminding everyone that SLIPKNOT are not merely played. They are assembled, struck, triggered, and unleashed.
What separates SLIPKNOT from so many bands who emerged around the same era is that their heaviness was never just a sound. It was a worldview. They sounded like people who had been failed by institutions, families, bodies, gods, systems, and themselves. That is why their music continues to resonate. The masks are spectacular, but the pain is not theatrical. The spectacle gives the pain a language.
The End, So Far appears ready to push that language into another unstable form. There will be blast-force aggression, certainly. There will be hooks sharpened into weapons, percussion that feels like a riot in a locked room, and Taylor’s voice dragging itself between venom and vulnerability. But there also appears to be space here for discomfort, atmosphere, melody, and experimentation that does not ask permission from the band’s past.
That may be the most SLIPKNOT thing about it. This band has always been at its most dangerous when it seems willing to destroy its own shape in order to discover what remains inside. The End, So Far does not sound like an ending in the traditional sense. It sounds like the final page of one book being torn out and used to start the fire for the next.
The masks are changing. The machine is still breathing. The congregation is already restless. And with The End, So Far, SLIPKNOT seem prepared to prove once again that survival is not the same as peace, and evolution is not the same as escape.
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