From tragic deaths to acrimonious departures, extreme metallers Slipknot have endured six years that would have destroyed most other bands. But, with an extraordinary new album and world tour, they’re back and ‘real as hell’

In October 2014, Slipknot’s Corey Taylor was interviewed by someone he never expected to meet: not someone from the metal press, but the veteran US broadcaster Larry King. “It was fucking weird!” laughs Taylor. “He was an absolute gentleman, one of the coolest people I’ve ever met, but he’s talked to everyone, so it was like ‘No pressure, Corey!’ you know? His producer said that if he’s intrigued, he’ll go off script and he did that a lot after a while. That’s a hell of a compliment.”

Midway through the interview, which aired on King’s online talk show Larry King Now, Taylor produced his latest mask. When onstage the band all wear grotesque disguises, originally intended to reflect how they saw themselves and their music, and update them for every album cycle. There have been leather masks with giant protruding pins (Craig Jones), the grotesque clown (Shawn Crahan), a gas mask that has slowly mutated into a robotic skull (Sid Wilson). King’s expression – part confusion, part mild terror – said it all.

“I don’t know if you could see, but I put the mask on for him and I pulled that top part down … Oh man, his eyes!” Taylor laughs. “He was like ‘What the hell is that?’ Ha ha! It was a very cool experience. That’s Slipknot. Bending the zeitgeist to our will, as always.”

The reason Taylor was invited on to King’s show is simple: Slipknot, far from being some niche group beloved of gore-obsessed adolescents, are massive. They exploded on to the metal scene in 1999, combining the infectious simplicity of nu metal with the snarling, dissonant fury of death metal, and rose rapidly. First, they conquered the arena circuit – thanks, in part, to their devoted fans, the “maggots” – then the festival bills, becoming the biggest metal band since Metallica. When Slipknot hit the UK later this week, they will be playing to sold-out arenas.

The band’s path to success has been littered with obstacles, especially in the period between the release of their fourth album, All Hope Is Gone, in 2008, and their latest, .5: The Gray Chapter, late in 2014. In May 2010, one of Slipknot’s founding members – bassist and songwriter Paul Gray – died following an accidental overdose of morphine and fentanyl. Then in late in 2013 the band abruptly announced the departure of drummer, founder and songwriter Joey Jordison, only for Jordison to tell the world that he had been as surprised as anyone outside the band to learn of his departure.

During those years, speculation among media and fans was rife and hinged on whether or not Slipknot could credibly continue without Gray and Jordison, and whether Taylor would take control of the band and drag them in the more radio-friendly direction favoured by his other band Stone Sour (“A lot of people think I’m the asshole behind the wheel,” Taylor notes. “I’m not, but you just have to roll with it.”) In the end, .5: The Gray Chapter picked deftly up from where the band had left off, exhibiting plenty of the usual chaos and cacophony, but balanced by increasingly refined melodies.

“After Paul died, it was important to find the mindset where we wanted to make another album,” Taylor says. “That’s why we took so long to get to that point. The first shows we did were about trying to get back on our feet. We were like toys in the box, all loose and trying to find the right pieces. It felt like the more we went out and toured, the closer we got and the more we’d lean on each other. But everyone had to go through their own process of dealing with it before we could finally land on the same page. Once we did that, it became a sense of, ‘What is this going to mean? What is it going to be?’ and I think we rose to the occasion really well.”

By turns euphoric and harrowing, brutal and tender, .5: The Gray Chapter is an extraordinary record that went straight to No 1 in the US and Japan and several other countries (it reached No 2 in the UK). No other band has ever taken such wilfully extreme and menacing music to the top of the charts anywhere in the world. For instance, the album’s lead single, The Negative One, offered the markedly daytime radio unfriendly message: “I hope you live / To see the day / When your world comes up in flames / And as you die / You see my face / You’re the only one to blame.”

“No one’s more surprised by our success than we are, believe me,” Taylor says. “If you sat down and drew this up as a play, in sports terms, it would blow up in your face. People have been trying to paint us into a corner and keep us down, because we scare the shit out of the rest of the industry. We do what we want and we say what we want. If a few people don’t understand us … well, it’s a war of art, in a lot of ways, and we win every time. I don’t fucking know why, but one of the reasons is that we back it up, and we’re as real as hell.”

To truly understand Slipknot’s appeal, you really need to see the band’s live show. Slipknot gigs are an eye-frying spectacle and a skilfully executed exercise in controlled mayhem and dark imagination. The band have often stated that they represent “a lifestyle” rather than just a hatful of musical ideas, and the way their diverse, multigenerational audience sings along with every word of songs such as Duality (“I have screamed until my veins collapsed / I’ve waited as my time’s elapsed / Now, all I do is live with so much hate”) or Surfacing (“Fuck it all! / Fuck this world! / Fuck everything that you stand for!”) confirms that there is substance and soul behind the cartoonish masks and outsider bravado.

“It can’t just be fucking nuts all the time,” Taylor says. “There’s got to be something behind the eyes. That’s what we’ve done so well. We’ve created something really artistic that can just turn on you at any second. It’s like having that gorgeous dog … it’s your pet, you love that fucking dog, it goes everywhere with you, but you never know when you’re gonna wake up and its teeth are around your fucking neck. That’s Slipknot.”

• Slipknot tours the UK from today. Details slipknot1.com