Slipknot don’t ever want their music to be “too easy to digest”.
Guitarist Mick Thomson hates it when people to try pigeonhole music and never wants the ‘Duality’ rockers – who continue to push boundaries with their eclectic sound – to be put in a box.
He told Total Guitar: “It shouldn’t be too easy to digest or even categorise.
“When we did ‘Vol.3: The Subliminal Verses’, I was listening to a burn of rough mixes in my car in Des Moines. The guys in the band Cephalic Carnage were playing in Des Moines that night, so I was playing the songs for one of the guys in the band and he was like, ‘This is just so different. What is it? It’s metal, but it’s not metal. How do you define it?’
“And I said, ‘Stop trying to f****** nail it to a wall as something and just enjoy it as music!’
“You don’t have to put yourself in a narrow type of pigeonhole, and that’s what I love about metal more than a lot of other music.
“You can draw from a lot more places.
“Punk always sounds like punk, but metal can go in a million different directions.”
Meanwhile, guitarists Jim Root and Mick recently insisted Slipknot continue to make the best music of their career because they dropped “egos and the “bull****” early on.
The metal legends released their seventh studio album ‘The End, So Far’ on September 30, and the ‘All Out Life’ rocker insisted the reason they’ve stuck together for more than two decades and always top their last release is that they are all equals and still “love” what they do.
Speaking to Australian Guitar Magazine, guitarist Jim said: “We’re getting to that point in our career where we’re all in this together.
“We all want to do the best we can for the role we play in this band, and when that becomes the priority, that’s when you put ego aside, put all that bull**** aside, and work together to make something great.”
Mick added: “We’d be stupid to keep doing this if we didn’t love it.
“There’s too much bull****.
“I think the biggest problem that breaks up bands is when everyone comes in with f****** egos.
“When egos and bull**** start to make a person nutty, that’s when problems happen and musicians start to hate each other.
“Fortunately, in the first few years after we blew up, nobody’s ego got too far out of check.
“And that can happen real f*****’ easy.”
He added: “There’s no I, there’s us.”