Slipknot's debut album still sounds terrifying

Most of all, what characterized the decade was the ennui that engulfed the suburbs and small towns idealized in that AI slop video.

- Bhanuj Kappal

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.

Combining death metal and thrash metal with elements of electronica, funk and hip-hop, the band's major label debut is a barrage of relentless misanthropy, a declaration of total war against the universe at large. "F*** it all, f*** this world, f*** everything that you stand for," screams frontman Cory Taylor over Surfacing's blast-beat drums and seismic guitar riffs. Over 15 tracks of curb-stomping mayhem, Slipknot gave shape and sound to an anger that had no object, no outlet, and no future.