Slipknot's Iowa turns 25, the album the band made at its breaking point

Iowa, the second Slipknot album, has reached 25 years. It came out on August 28, 2001 through Roadrunner Records and is still the record the band's own audience reaches for when the argument is about which one hits hardest.

It was written in a hurry and under no obligation to be. Rather than take a break after a punishing tour behind the self-titled debut, drummer Joey Jordison and bassist Paul Gray went straight to Gray's brother's house and started writing, at a clip of up to seventeen hours a day.

Sessions began on January 17, 2001 at Sound City in Los Angeles with Ross Robinson, who had produced the debut. Vocalist Corey Taylor told Louder that the brotherhood of the first record was gone: "We were just all at odds with each other." He put it down to some mix of jealousy and insecurity about who was pulling their weight.

The chaos went well past interpersonal tension. Robinson reportedly broke his back during the making of the album and produced much of it from a wheelchair without softening his approach. Taylor told Loudwire he was drinking heavily and cutting himself while recording. Percussionist Shawn Crahan has said he contemplated suicide during the same stretch, under the weight of sudden fame and a new fanbase's expectations.

Jordison described the process as confinement. "You're trapped until it's done," he said of making a Slipknot record, in a joint band interview where he also called his bandmates the best musicians in the world. Percussionist Chris Fehn noted in the same conversation that the band's new money meant access to drugs they had not been able to afford before.

The music took the shape of all that. Where the debut leaned on turntables, samplers and rap-metal phrasing, Iowa stripped much of that out for longer, riffier writing built on blast beats. Guitarists Jim Root and Mick Thomson, both pulled more toward thrash and death metal than nu-metal, pushed songs like "People = Shit" and "The Heretic Anthem" close to outright death metal.

"Left Behind," written out of Taylor's period of homelessness in Des Moines, arrived as the lead single on October 29, 2001, earned a Grammy nomination and reached number 30 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. The album's release was overtaken by the aftermath of 9/11, and the band went into a hiatus afterwards, scattering into Stone Sour and Murderdolls while the press wondered whether they would record together again.

Twenty-five years on, Iowa is certified platinum in several countries and reads as the point where Slipknot committed to their most extreme instincts rather than sanding them down. The band's more recent news has been about who is in it: they confirmed Sid Wilson's exit after 28 years this year, and the mask designer Screaming Mad George, whose work helped define the era, died at 69. Twenty-five years of metal records have been measured against this one.