Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

I wasn't planning on listening to We Are Not Your Kind in the same manner I usually do when highly-anticipated albums drop. If I'm super excited, I'll listen to the album the second it drops at midnight, let it process, and bang out a review before daybreak. However, school is starting soon (one of the bleakest thoughts I've had all summer and this summer has been shit), and I was planning on getting my sleep schedule back to normal in preparation. However, I just couldn't help myself. After all, what better way to channel my anxiety and dread for the upcoming school year than through some of the most notoriously cathartic music out there?

Luckily, Slipknot really pulled through on We Are Not Your Kind, delivering one of their best albums to date. It's surprisingly mature, but that doesn't mean it sacrifices any heaviness in the process. Sure, it's got a few slower numbers, just like every other Slipknot album (Vol. 3 had Vermilion, Pt. 2, All Hope Is Gone had Snuff, etc.). However, it has even more moments of crushing heaviness and classic nu metal angst (see Orphan). No one ever said maturity had to suck the fun out of metal, right?

I think the tracklist could have seriously benefitted from the inclusion of All Out Life. That song seriously grew on me and I continue to warm up to it more and more--I think it's one of Slipknot's best songs in decades, and one of their best singles period. If that song were added here, it might have bumped this album up higher than Iowa in my ranking of the Slipknot discography, no joke. Speaking of Iowa, as heavy as this album can be, I don't agree with the general consensus that this is as heavy if not heavier than Iowa. For crying out loud, that album has a DEATH METAL secondary on RateYourMusic! You'd be hard-pressed to get a thrash metal secondary on this album through those guys. That doesn't make it inherently worse, though. The industrial touches make it one of the most unique Slipknot albums the band has ever put out, and it sets the album apart from most of the nu metal crowd Slipknot's associated with. I find it hard to compare this album to the bands Slipknot was compared to back in the 90's and early 2000's; it sounds nothing like Mudvayne or Korn. It has more in common with modern nu metalcore bands like Cane Hill than it does with Limp Bizkit. In fact, I'd say that while the band has dabbled with the various sounds of metalcore on albums like All Hope Is Gone, We Are Not Your Kind immerses itself in metalcore in ways that no other Slipknot album has. It feels like they're taking notes from the newer bands they inspired, which is pretty cool if I do say so myself.

At its core, however, We Are Not Your Kind is still a Slipknot record through and through, which is one of my favorite things about it. It's mature and experimental, yet it knows who it's made by. It knows how to please the core fanbase, yet appeal to newcomers and skeptics who passed Slipknot off as mask-wearing gimmick artists (who they arguably were, on the surface at least). It has plenty of classic Slipknot headbangers and riff-heavy natural disasters disguising as songs. At the end of the day, this is what most bands should aim for after a long silence--an album that continues the band's legacy, maintains the patented sound, and pleases the core fanbase while simultaneously expanding the band's sound palette and extending an olive branch to people who were never on board...in the most Slipknot way possible.

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FOR FANS OF: Disturbed, Mushroomhead, Mudvayne, Marilyn Manson, Dope, Cane Hill

Favorite tracks: Unsainted, Nero Forte, Critical Darling, A Liar's Funeral, Red Flag, Spiders, Orphan, Not Long For This World

Least favorite tracks: none, really

(Nu Metal, Groove Metal, Industrial Metal, Groove Metal, Metalcore)