Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor takes us inside the creation of the band's incredible single Solway Firth.
If you couldn't already tell from the tracks that have been released in advance of Slipknot's new album We Are Not Your Kind – Unsainted, Solway Firth and Birth Of The Cruel – the Iowa metal titans have been treading entirely new waters on album number six.
And perhaps most fascinating of all (well… so far – if you want any more spoilers then check out our review of the record) are Corey Taylor's vocal inflections on Solway Firth, which, the frontman tells Kerrang!, were inspired by both the music he was hearing from his bandmates in the studio, but also English folk songs and movies.
“Obviously I’m a self-professed Anglophile," he laughs, "and I’d been watching some shows and movies that had this English almost folk music to it: the way the annunciation changes depending on the singer – there’s hint of Irish in there, and there’s just that nuance that you really don’t get in anything other than that English folk music. And that’s where I really took the inspiration from it.
“It was just this dirge – this lilting dirge, almost like walking down a hill towards you ominously before the hoard comes over and fucking charges with that primal scream, you know?” Corey continues. “That’s really where the inspiration for that came from: a hint of that dark English countryside, that Wicker Man, that vibe of, ‘This is really fucking uncomfortable! What’s happening?’ And then all of a sudden: the punch of the scream, the drums, the guitar, everything just shattering and going to complete shit. It was awesome.”
Of Solway's creation in the studio, there was one member in particular who was really into what Corey was doing with his vocals: “Honestly, that [intro] was one of the first things that Clown really dug – the way that I was singing that at the beginning of it," the frontman says.
"He and I love disturbing stuff. We love things that feel unconventional, and uncontrolled, and left-field. And so when I started to sing it and use that inflection, he was like, ‘Dude! What the fuck is that?!’ And then with the stuttering on ‘they muttttttterrrrrr as the bodiesssssss’, he was just fucking over the moon. He was like, ‘Dude, that’s my favourite thing you’ve ever done.’ Which is saying something, because we’ve been doing music together for fucking 22 years! When I know when I’ve got Clown is when he starts smiling and nodding – like, I can’t even hear him, because I just see him in the booth, but I know he’s got a million fucking ideas for it.”
Read the story behind every song on We Are Not Your Kind in the new issue of Kerrang!, on sale Wednesday, August 7. You can pre-order the issue right now at Kerrang.Newsstand.co.uk and get it delivered straight to your door, anywhere in the world.
