“We’re from the middle of nowhere, so we might as well record in the middle of nowhere,” Corey said, noting that he would use the drive in to listen to rough mixes of the songs and play through ideas in his head. He also endeavoured to make the drive home every evening – both to see his young son and to avoid the craziness that tended to accompany any Slipknot recording session onsite. On this particular occasion, it involved quadbikes, explosives and guns.
“There was a .22, a couple of handguns and a nice pump-action shotgun,” Corey told us. “I got to fire some of that shit, which was cool but, thankfully, before those guys got too out of control with it, Clown put a stop to it. He was like, ‘We are Slipknot, and somebody’s going to get killed.’”
Thankfully no-one did. The end result was an album that saw Slipknot flexing their muscles and spreading their wings. Gematria (The Killing Name) was as brutal an opener as (sic) from the debut album, but then you had the creeping chill of Gehenna and the full-on dark balladry of Snuff – one of the positive things to have come from Corey’s break-up. “This is the slow one. Not naming names, it’s about someone who helped me through a lot and I thought she felt the same way I did and then she really let me down,” he suggested at the time.