SR Audio, a room in Des Moines, between December 1995 and March 1996. Eight men, one of them behind a sampler, one of them hitting a beer keg, and about forty thousand dollars of their own money going into a record no label had asked for. What came out on 31 October 1996 was Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat., sung by Anders Colsefni, and there is more death metal on it than on everything Slipknot released afterwards put together.
Hold that in mind, because it is the whole reason the question is worth asking rather than laughing at.
The short answer
No. Slipknot are not a death metal band and never have been. They are a nu metal band, or an alternative metal band if you prefer the wider term, and the tests that decide the matter are not close ones. But the question is not a stupid question, because the group grew directly out of a Des Moines death metal scene, because two of its founders were playing death metal for years before it existed, and because one of their albums borrows more from this genre than any other record that has ever gone top three in America.
Where the question actually comes from
It comes from the personnel. Anders Colsefni and Paul Gray were in a band called Vexx from 1988 with Josh Brainard, and both were then in Body Pit, a Des Moines death metal band that ran from 1993 to 1995 with Donnie Steele on guitar. Body Pit split in 1995. Gray, Colsefni and Steele formed Slipknot out of the wreckage almost immediately. That is not a stylistic influence at second hand. That is the same men, the same town, the same year.
You can hear it on the 1996 record. The vocal is a genuine growl rather than a shout, the riffs on parts of it are tremolo picked, and the arrangements go where death metal arrangements go, which is somewhere other than back to the chorus. There is also jazz on it, and funk, and a track that treats grindcore as a starting point for a joke. It is the sound of a band with nine ideas and no editor, which is exactly what a first self funded record should sound like.
Then Corey Taylor arrived, and Slipknot became a different band. Colsefni moved to percussion and then left. The songs acquired choruses that a stadium could sing back. Roadrunner signed them. Whatever you think of what followed, it was no longer this genre, and it stopped being this genre on purpose.
The death metal is not a rumour about Slipknot. It is their previous band, and it stayed in Des Moines when they signed.
The tests, applied
Genre arguments get settled by asking what the instruments are doing, not by counting how frightening the sleeve is. Here are the five that matter, applied honestly.
- The voice. A death metal vocal is a growl for the whole record. Taylor alternates growls, screams and clean singing, and the clean singing is not an occasional relief, it is the hook the songs are built to deliver. That alone settles it.
- The riffs. Death metal writes chromatic lines and long tremolo runs. Slipknot write syncopated single note grooves with space in them, which is a different craft descended from hardcore and from funk rhythm playing.
- The drums. Blast beats appear. They are punctuation rather than the engine, and the default is a groove built to be felt in the hips.
- Song shape. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus. Death metal is built in blocks that never come back.
- The rest of the stage. Turntables, samples, two dedicated percussionists on custom kits. None of that exists in death metal, and it is not an accessory here, it is a third of the arrangement.
Score it: one and a half out of five, and the half is generous. Tuning is the only category where the two genres agree, and low tuning is common to half of heavy music since 1994, so it proves nothing on its own.
Iowa, and how close they got
The record that keeps the argument alive is Iowa, made with Ross Robinson at Sound City in Van Nuys and released by Roadrunner on 28 August 2001. It went to number one in Britain and Canada and to three on the Billboard 200, and it is sixty six minutes long and almost entirely without relief. "People = Shit" and "Disasterpiece" have been compared to death metal by people who were not trying to flatter anybody, and Joey Jordison put blast beats on a record that sold in the millions, which almost nothing else in the mainstream has done before or since.
Even so, Iowa is a heavy nu metal album rather than a death metal one, and the difference is audible in the first thirty seconds of any track on it. The riffs are grooves. The choruses are choruses. The extremity is in the intensity and the volume rather than in the writing, and death metal is a writing style before it is anything else.
The label, and the band the drummer actually made
There is one more piece of circumstantial evidence people reach for, and it deserves an answer because it is genuinely interesting. Slipknot signed to Roadrunner, and Roadrunner in the early 1990s was the American home of this genre: Obituary, Deicide, Immolation, Malevolent Creation, Suffocation and Gorguts all released through it. But the label had already turned by the time Slipknot arrived. Gorguts were dropped in 1993, the year death metal stopped selling, and by the end of the decade the roster had been rebuilt around something else entirely. Slipknot did not join a death metal label. They joined the label that had stopped being one.
The clean test is what the members did when nobody was watching. Joey Jordison spent 1998 onwards writing material that had no place in his own band, and in May 2016 it came out as Sinsaenum, a blackened death metal group with Frederic Leclercq of DragonForce and Attila Csihar of Mayhem in it, three albums deep on earMUSIC. That is what a Slipknot member playing extreme metal actually sounds like, and it sounds nothing like Slipknot. Jordison died in July 2021, at 46.
What they are instead, and why it matters
Slipknot are one of the two or three most successful heavy bands of the last thirty years, they are genuinely extreme by the standards of anything that has sold at their scale, and none of that requires them to be death metal. Bands get miscategorised in the direction of whatever the person asking already respects, and that is a bad reason to move a band across a line.
The useful thing this question does is send people looking. If what you want is the thing you thought you were getting, the growl for the whole record, the chromatic writing, the songs with no chorus to come home to, then start with who to listen to and give it the three plays it needs. And if you would rather see this argument run on a band with an actual claim to the title, Is Slayer Death Metal is where it gets genuinely difficult.
