Frédéric Leclercq was lying in bed on July 26, 2021, when his phone began buzzing incessantly. Texts, calls, messages on social media, all asking the same question: had he heard the news? Joey Jordison had died.
“I remember being head in hands hearing it all,” he says today, recalling how he’d ignored his phone at first until his girlfriend spotted a headline online.
Frédéric had been bandmates with Joey in death metal group Sinsaenum, and while the band were taking a breather after an intense few years, he remembers being struck numb by the news. “My father had died the year before and I remember thinking, ‘I should be getting used to this.’ But Joey was a brother to me. It’s so fucking sad.”
A similar scenario was unfolding for the members of Vimic. Formed from the ashes of Joey’s previous band, Scar The Martyr, Vimic were the first band the drummer had launched since his dismissal from Slipknot in December 2013. But their debut album had been repeatedly delayed by various label and personnel setbacks, and remained unreleased. The band had gone into stasis in 2018, but some of its members remained close with the drummer.
“Someone messaged asking if I’d spoken to Joey lately, and I knew something was up,” admits vocalist Kalen Chase, recalling the moment he heard the news of Joey’s death. “We’d had a lot of missed connections – he’d miss my call, then he’d call back and I’d miss his call. Then suddenly, Kyle [Konkiel, Vimic bassist] calls me and says, ‘He’s gone.’ It was a shock.”
No official cause of death was disclosed, but five years earlier Joey had opened up about being diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a rare neurological condition that had affected his drumming and seen him hospitalised. In spite of that, he was far from done. But his passing closed the book on a remarkable career. Or so it seemed.
In April 2025, a Kickstarter was launched by the Joey Jordison Charitable Fund, a group run by his sisters Annie and Katie to honour his legacy. Their aim was to finally release Vimic’s shelved debut album, Open Your Omen.
“I’d figured it was over,” Kalen admits. “Then earlier this year, I got a message from Annie saying they’d finally brought the masters back. We got talking and we figured things out to finally get the album to fans and put on a show in tribute to Joey. It’s been great, but also bittersweet.”
Vimic aren’t the only one of Joey’s post-Slipknot bands to return in 2025. In June, Sinsaenum announced they would be releasing a brand new album, In Devastation, on August 8. Featuring drummer André Joyzi – who once served as Joey’s drum tech – the album is dedicated to Jordison as well as Frédéric Leclercq’s father, Pierre, and Sinsaenum lighting engineer Frédéric Müller, who died in 2024.
“It was obvious the album had to be dedicated to Joey,” says Frédéric. “It’s a very heavy thing. It’s hard to talk about a lot.”
While both of Joey’s former bands are making a return in 2025, their positions couldn’t be more different. But although one is a swansong and the other a rebirth, both pay tribute to Joey Jordison in the most fitting way they can: by keeping his music alive.
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Nobody entertained the idea that Joey Jordison would retire from music when he was fired from Slipknot via email in 2013. In some ways, he’d already prepped for the future. Eight months earlier, he’d announced Scar The Martyr, a project featuring former members of Darkest Hour, Strapping Young Lad and Nine Inch Nails.
“Going into Scar The Martyr, I didn’t know Joey at all,” admits Kyle Konkiel, who played bass in both Scar The Martyr and Vimic. “He actually started writing for [our debut] album in 2011, and it was recorded in late 2012, early 2013. It was a passion project because he’d been dying to get back into the studio after Paul [Gray, Slipknot bassist] had passed. There were a lot of things he needed to get off his chest and songs he’d worked on with Paul at one point. But we never worried people would be like, ‘So when are you making ‘Iowa 2’?”
Scar The Martyr’s self-titled debut was released on October 1, 2013. The band were on tour in the UK when news broke that Joey was no longer in Slipknot. It was a shock to everyone outside the Slipknot circle, but Joey already had other irons in various fires.
Frédéric Leclercq was the bassist with Dragonforce when he’d first met Joey several years earlier. Some initial tension over a misfiring joke (“We called him a maggot, he said, ‘No, that’s what we call our fans’, and we said, ‘No, we’re saying you’re a maggot,’” recalls a sheepish Frédéric) was forgotten the next time they met. The pair bonded over beer and death metal, coming up with a shorthand phrase to celebrate their love of the genre – ‘M.A.’, meaning Morbid Angel.
Frédéric had been trying to get his own death metal group together since the late 1990s, when he’d recorded a rough version of future Sinsaenum song King Of The Desperate Lands. So when Joey texted the letters ‘M.A.’ to Frédéric, the bassist decided it was time to step up. He and guitarist Stéphane Buriez met up with Joey when Scar The Martyr played The Underworld club in London, the final show of their UK tour.
The news about Joey leaving Slipknot had broken a few days earlier, and the tension backstage was palpable. Instead, they discussed the idea for Frédéric’s band, which he was calling Sinsaenum.
“We didn’t even touch that subject [Slipknot] because we knew it must be pretty weird for him,” Frédéric admits. “Instead we got talking about Sinsaenum – our plans, what it was gonna sound like. I think he really appreciated that.”
Sinsaenum wouldn’t get off the ground immediately, because Joey had more pressing matters at hand. Scar The Martyr had collapsed following the departure of vocalist Henry Derek in April 2014. Rather than scrap the project, he opted to recruit a new singer. Joey had originally met Kalen Chase while sitting in for Korn drummer David Silveria in 2007.
“Kalen was one of Joey’s best friends, so he didn’t know if he wanted to work with him in that way at first,” says Kyle Konkiel. “But I thought it was exactly what he needed after everything happened with Slipknot. He just needed a circle of people who loved and cared about him.”
Rebranding themselves Vimic (“Joey used to love coming up with bandnames,” Kalen recalls. “He’d call me at two in the morning like, ‘How about this?’ It was like, ‘Dude, we can call it Penisbrain if you just let me fucking sleep!’”), the group started recording their debut album, Open Your Omen, with producer Kato Khandwala in October 2014.
“Kato had this incredible way of culminating all these ideas Joey had,” Kalen says. “He kept us from going nuts. Joey could be very driven and focused, he knew exactly where he wanted things to sit in the tonal range. Kato gave no shits about what kinds of music we wanted to play, he just wanted it to sound great, so they worked well together.”
Recording Open Your Omen was the easy part. Getting it released was much harder. Initially signed to Roadrunner Records, the home of Slipknot, Vimic were dropped before the album could be released due to what Kyle calls “a conflict of interests”.
In 2017, they signed to Universal and drafted in Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine to play guitar on a new single, Fail Me (My Temple). But tragedy struck in April 2018, when Kato Khandwala was killed in a motorcycle accident. For Joey, who had been pumping money his own money into the band to keep it going, it was the final straw.
“Joey spent probably a million dollars since we’d recorded the album,” Kyle reveals. “Vimic was Joey’s baby, but it got to a point where it was like, ‘I can’t do this right now because I’m haemorrhaging cash.’”
The ever-restless drummer had been pulling double duty, playing with both Vimic and Sinsaenum. The latter released their first, self-titled EP on June 6, 2016, rapidly followed by their full-length debut, Echoes Of The Tortured, on July 29, and another EP, A Taste Of Sin, on August 5. But although Sinsaenum featured members of Dragonforce, progressive death metallers Dååth and Mayhem frontman Attila Csihar, it was Joey who inevitably drew the most interest.
“There was a lot of ‘Joey Jordison’s new band!’” Frédéric says. “I was like, ‘I thought it was my band!’ But at the same time, we didn’t mind. It actually helped – it wasn’t really a selling point to have ‘The death metal band featuring the guy from Dragonforce.’”
Where Vimic’s debut album was mired in music industry hell, Sinsaenum had no such issues. They followed up that initial burst of activity with 2017’s Ashes EP and a second album, Repulsion For Humanity, the following year, all featuring Joey on drums. But for Frédéric, who left Dragonforce and joined German thrashers Kreator in 2019, as well as launching another new band, Amahiru, Sinsaenum were slipping down his list of priorities.
“I was burned out,” he admits. “We decided to carry on, but I was just going to write the music I liked and take my time.”
Unfortunately for Joey, time wasn’t on his side.
Four years on from Joey Jordison’s death, the grief is still apparent in his former bandmates’ voices. They all remember the drummer’s prodigious talent and professionalism, as well as his tendency for goofball antics, whether that was solemnly repeating the word ‘farts’ to Kalen right before Vimic played a song (“I was trying so hard not to laugh”), or speeding up in rehearsals to the point everyone else could barely even breathe. But there were difficult times too.
“Joey and I had our disagreements towards the end of the band and didn’t really speak much before he passed,” Kyle says sadly. “I regret every day that I didn’t reach out to him sooner.”
“We had several deep discussions, not all of them pleasant,” recalls Frédéric. “I don’t want to go into too much detail, but he told me that he felt we were his brothers and he loved this music. That really touched me, but it also made me mad when he died and I saw people paying tribute who I knew weren’t there for him when he needed them.”
The shadow that Joey cast over 21st-century metal is so large that it was always unlikely anyone would forget him or his legacy. This much was evident in the reaction to the Vimic Kickstarter fund set up by Joey’s sister, which not only met its initial goal of $25,000 within 24 hours but has gone on to quadruple it – “a barrage of kindness and compassion”, as Kalen describes it. Inevitably, there were negative voices calling it a cash grab.
“None of us are making a lot of money on this,” says Kyle firmly. “As for why now – we just didn’t have the hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the masters. Katie and Annie are the reason this is happening at all – they used the money [from his estate] to save the masters.”
The announcement of Sinsaenum’s new album wasn’t met with the same pushback, but Frédéric says there was careful consideration on who could take Joey’s place, hence the presence of his former drum tech. “It was important to me to have a family vibe,” he says. “This album is really hard for me to explain. I always thought I could transform pain and emotions into music, but it didn’t work. The grief left me really empty. But ultimately Sinsaenum comes out of love - for the genre, the people involved, the adventure we’re on together.”
Sinsaenum plan to tour later this year, with UK and European dates in October. By contrast, Vimic had just one date planned. On October 3, they played a special tribute show at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles, honouring Joey. For it, theyflew his Vimic drumkit in from Iowa, and recruited Joey’s Murderdolls bandmate Wednesday 13 as support.
“I didn’t even get to play the last show Vimic played because I had another commitment, so to get this sense of closure is incredible,” Kyle says. “It’s my ‘I love you’ to Joey. We finally did it – and not only in a way that pays tribute to him, but what he stood for.”
And what would Joey be doing if he was still with us? Frédéric Leclercq has no doubts. “He’d be playing!” he says. “I’d probably get a text from him saying, ‘M.A.’ I wish he was still with us.”
Vimic's Open Your Omen and Sinsaenum's In Devastation is out now. Sinsaenum play The Underworld in London on October 17.
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