Slipknot's debut album still sounds terrifying

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across an AI video on Twitter peddling a schmalzy, sepia-tinged vision of 1990s America. Algorithmically generated teenagers in baggy denim and oversized hoodies wax eloquent about malls, corner stores and backyard hangouts—white-flight suburbia recast as some sort of halcyon paradise. "The 1990s miss you bro," says one prepper, with the self-satisfied smirk of someone who never had to actually live through the decade.

- BHANUJ KAPPAL

But the 1990s in America wasn't all boom-boxes and mall rats. This was also the decade of the Los Angeles riots beamed live into living rooms, of Monica Lewinsky and the Justice Clarence Thomas sexual assault hearings dragging sex and power into the national spotlight. It was the decade of the Waco siege that ended with 76 dead and the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, of the opioid crisis and a companion epidemic of high-profile suicides.

Most of all, what characterized the decade was the ennui that engulfed the suburbs and small towns idealized in that AI slop video. In the first half of the 1990s, artists tried to channel that ennui into anthems of alienation (Nirvana) or political fury (Rage Against The Machine). But as we got closer to the turn of the millennium, all that was left was nihilistic rage. White-hot, impotent anger that built up till it exploded into bouts of random, misdirected violence—the Columbine massacre, the riots and widespread sexual assault of Woodstock '99.

You can hear that (mostly white, mostly male) fury in the nu-metal music that dominated the era: Korn rendering childhood trauma and drug-addiction in down-tuned, funk-metal chaos; the industrial-emo of Deftones, even in Limp Bizkit's fratboy rap-metal. But nothing quite captured the late 1990s malaise quite as perfectly as the eponymous 1999 debut album by alt-metal nonet Slipknot, which has just been re-released as a belated 25th anniversary edition, with 40 new unreleased demos and tracks.