Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of Slipknot's titanically heavy and mega-successful Iowa album. The record installed the Iowan nine-piece as the single biggest heavy metal band of their generation, racking up millions of sales and becoming the heaviest album ever to top the UK album charts.
It was also a record fraught with tension and turbulence, however. The infamous recording sessions, which took place over two and a half months with producer Ross Robinson at LA’s Sound City Studios, featured arguments, breakdowns, violence and, most memorably, frontman Corey Taylor, naked, in a vocal booth, cutting himself with glass as he screamed into the mic.
In some newly unearthed footage from the sessions (perhaps thankfully, not of that particular aforementioned incident), Taylor's full-on approach to his vocal duties on Iowa are laid bare for all to see and hear. After someone that we believe to be Robinson is shown asking Taylor to let his next vocal take "be more open", the topless Slipknot singer lets rip with a series of increasingly guttural screams that are so violent they make our throats tingle just hearing them.
"The recording process was such a gnarly experience for us, we really wanted a month to get our heads together and we didn’t get that,” Taylor told us last year. “They threw us right into the mouth of the monster."
Was it all worth it? Slipknot fans might think so: Iowa remains an iron-clad classic, arguably the peak of Slipknot's creative output. The effect it had on the band's nine members, however, lingers to this day.
Watch the footage of Corey Taylor screaming his guts out below. New Slipknot album The End So Far is out September 30 via Roadrunner, with recent single Yen streaming now.
