Slipknot Score Third U.S. Number One Album With We Are Not Your Kind

Following their triumphant win over Ed Sheeran in UK charts last Friday, Slipknot's We Are Not Your Kind has now hit the top spot in the Billboard 200 chart in America.

The Iowa titans' stunning new record earned 118,000 equivalent units in their home country, with an impressive 102,000 consisting of album sales. And just like the UK charts, the release is the first heavy record to reach Number One for quite some time; in fact, We Are Not Your Kind is the first "hard rock" album to top the Billboard 200 since Foo Fighters' epic Concrete And Gold on October 7, 2017.

Slipknot have previously reached Number One in the U.S. with 2014's .5: The Gray Chapter and 2008's All Hope Is Gone. Congratulations, guys!

Speaking to Kerrang! about the pride the ’Knot feel about We Are Not Your Kind, frontman Corey Taylor says, “It’s one of those albums that really revealed itself once we really started to record it, and all of these elements that had been maybe waiting on the peripheral started to slowly but surely make their way in. Before, while we were doing the demos and whatnot, we were basically setting the bare bones of it. But the great thing about this band is that even the bare bones are great. But it’s once we start adding all the textures and stuff that Sid and Craig do, and then once I’ve written the lyrics and really been able to play with that this time, that’s when the songs started to reveal themselves.

“As the album started to progress, it went from my understanding of some of these songs being really heavy to, ‘This is a whole new evolution for the band.’ We have these brutal moments of heaviness, and yet these incredible moments of creative and artistic freedom – something that we haven’t really had in a while, probably since Vol. 3. We were able to really play with hints of what we’ve done in the past, but then create a whole new experience so that this album can stand on its own with all of the other albums. To me, the more I listen to it, the more I really – more than any other album we’ve made – I just love it. Especially from the first listen to today, I’ve embraced this album quicker than the other albums that we’ve made in the past.”

Expanding on the musical direction and how out-there the record is in places, Corey explains that it was partly Slipknot's plan to embrace their experimental sides in the studio, but that it also came naturally to keep pushing things even further.

“I think it’s a little of both,” he says. “It definitely happened naturally, but at the same time, I know that Clown had some ideas going into it. I mean, he and Jim both really deserve a lot of the credit for overseeing the creative process, musically, on this album. They had so many great ideas, and they were so inventive when it came to the textures and the sounds… it’s just such an experience of an album that, going into it, I don’t think we really had that idea. But as it started to mature, we were like, ‘Fuck, man, we’re going somewhere we’ve never been before, which is really exciting.’ It felt like we hadn’t kind of been in that moment for a long time, and we started to really chase that down.”

Read this next:

• Album review: Slipknot – We Are Not Your Kind
• 11 things we learned from Corey Taylor's Facebook live fan Q&A
• Jim Root's track-by-track guide to We Are Not Your Kind