After releasing their last album in summer 2019, Slipknot recently delighted their fans by dropping a brand new single called ‘The Chapeltown Rag.’ The single was released on several platforms, including YouTube, and the lyrics explore world problems.
‘We Are Not Your Kind,’ Slipknot’s 2019 album, received great positive feedback and became a very influential album. It debuted No. 1 on Billboard 200 and ranked in the Top 10 of twenty international charts. However, the band didn’t hit the brakes and announced that they had started working on a new record.
Although the upcoming record’s release date hasn’t been announced yet, the band released the new single ‘The Chapeltown Rag’ on November 5 and received a lot of love from fans. Slipknot also started a live stream that day that lasted for 72 hours for their fans to purchase tickets and watch them live from their screen at home.
The band’s frontman Corey Taylor spoke to Knotfest about this new release and revealed his inspirations for the song’s lyrics. Produced by Joe Baressi and written by Corey Taylor, the song’s lyrics are mainly concerned with the general problem people have with social media.
Taylor stated that the song was inspired by Chapeltown, a suburban place in Leeds, England. Chapeltown was where Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, lived and murdered his victims. Taylor got inspired after he watched a Netflix documentary about it. After finishing it, he started thinking about the ‘history of violence’ and concluded that social media drives people into ‘toxic’ situations.
Here is what he stated about the lyrics of the song:
“At that moment, everything was just kind of steering towards violence or a history of violence. And it was just such a weird echo of social media. And the fact that social media tries to steer you towards violence or steer you towards the most toxic thing – the most toxic moment. So I looked at it from that standpoint.
It’s classic Slipknot. And it’s frenetic. But lyrically, it’s coming from a point of talking about the various manipulations that can happen when social media meets media itself. And the different ways that these manipulations can try to pull us in different directions, in the fact that we’re all becoming addicts to it, which is very, very dangerous.”
The fans generally commented on the band aging back to their ‘raw’ sound and admired the drums and the bass sounds of the song. They also expressed that Corey Taylor’s screams hit differently in this song compared to their previous releases.
You can listen to ‘The Chapeltown Rag’ below.
