Slipknot have scored their first UK Number One album in 18 years with ‘We Are Not Your Kind’.

Released last week (August 9), the metal band’s sixth studio album is “an astonishing record: a roaring, horrifying delve into the guts of the band’s revulsion, a primal scream of endlessly inventive extreme metal and searing misanthropy,” according to NME writer Jordan Bassett.

The record has knocked Ed Sheeran’s ‘No.6 Collaborations Project’ off the top spot in the UK Official Albums Chart after making over 31,800 chart sales in its first week of release.


‘We Are Not Your Kind’ is the band’s fifth consecutive Top Five album. Slipknot’s breakthrough album ‘Iowa’ is their only UK Number One to date, landing on top of the charts in September 2001.

The achievement makes ‘We Are Not Your Kind’ only the fifth heavy metal album to reach the top of the UK charts this decade. The other records in that elite group include Iron Maiden‘s ‘The Book Of Souls’ and ‘The Final Frontier’, Avenged Sevenfold‘s ‘Hail To The King’, and Black Sabbath‘s ’13’.

Meanwhile, Slipknot‘s Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan has spoken of his desire for the band to perform smaller shows in the future.

With the group set to bring their new record to these shores for a run of UK dates in 2020, Crahan told NME that fans could also be seeing them in more low-key settings following the large-scale gigs.

Also speaking on the impact of the band’s breakthrough album ‘Iowa’, Clown said in the band’s NME Big Read interview: “I look at ‘Iowa’ as a bit of an anomaly because the world really flocks to that album – and I refuse to believe it’s just the album.”


Clown added: “I am absolutely convinced that it was the environment in the world at that time. That was the music of that time, and the world was in a serious place that we could all feel. And I’m here to tell you that the world is feeling a lot like that right now.

“We never sat back and thought, wow, this feels like that time, let’s make something like ‘Iowa’. This is ‘We Are Your Not Your Kind’ and it’s its own monster, but the world is in a serious state of disarray and we all feel it. It’s agitated. People are agitated. The system is agitated. People are fed up. And it’s feeling really dangerous.”