Slipknot oust Ed Sheeran and score first UK Number 1 album in 18 years
YES!
Slipknot’s ‘We Are Not Your Kind’ has officially beaten Ed Sheeran’s ‘No.6 Collaborations’ to the UK album chart top spot.
Ending Ed Sheeran’s four-week reign at the summit, Slipknot’s ‘We Are Not Your Kind’ has hit number one on the Official Albums Chart with over 31,800 chart sales consisting of 22,500 physical sales, 5,000 downloads and 4,300 streaming equivalent album sales.
‘We Are Not Your Kind’ is Slipknot’s second number one album of their distinguished career and their first since their ferocious masterpiece ‘Iowa’ almost exactly 18 years ago.
Slipknot were topping the chart at the midweek point on Monday by 13,000 sales thanks to strong downloads and physical sales, however Ed Sheeran was amassing more streams. Fortunately, the Iowan masked metallers prevailed.
Incredibly, ‘We Are Not Your Kind’ is the first heavy metal album to reach number one in the UK since Iron Maiden’s ‘The Book of Souls’ back in September 2015.
It’s also only the fifth metal album to reach number one on the Official Albums Chart this decade. The five albums are:
Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind
Number one: August 2019
Iron Maiden – The Book Of Souls
Number one: September 2015
Avenged Sevenfold – Hail To The King
Number one: September 2013
Black Sabbath – 13
Number One: June 2013
Iron Maiden – The Final Frontier
Number One: August 2010
Speaking to Kerrang! Radio’s Loz Guest this week, Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor said the band’s success is a “shot in the arm for the mainstream.”
Asked what ignited Slipknot’s increased mainstream appeal, Corey commented: “I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it. I think there’s a subliminal likability to it that maybe we didn’t even realise we had.
“Obviously, the internet has helped with reachability but I also think it’s just the fact that we can write a song, y’know regardless of what you think that song is supposed to sound like. The way we write songs still has very good pop sensibilities to it – at least old school pop, not this digitised waste of crap that you hear these days.
“We still know how to write a song, how to write a hook. We take it way out past the landscape and into the fringe but we still keep it in the framework of a really great song that you can feel. I think maybe that’s a bit of it."