Slipknot score first heavy metal Number 1 album since Iron Maiden's 'The Book of Souls'
Slipknot’s new album ‘We Are Not Your Kind’ has become the first heavy metal record since Iron Maiden’s ‘The Book of Souls’ to reach number one in the UK.
The Download Festival 2019 headliners ended the four-week reign of Ed Sheeran’s ‘No.6 Collaborations’ at the Official Albums Chart summit today (16th August) with their sixth studio effort ‘We Are Not Your Kind’.
The album sold 31,800 units 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 career and their first since their notoriously heavy album ‘Iowa’ almost exactly 18 years ago.
As well as being the first heavy metal album to hit Number 1 since Iron Maiden’s ‘The Book of Souls’ back in September 2015, incredibly it’s only the fifth metal record to reach the top spot this decade.
The five chart toppers are as follows:
Speaking to Kerrang! Radio this week, Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor said the band’s success is a “shot in the arm for the mainstream.”
He also waxed lyrical about Slipknot helping introduce new people to metal music: “I love the reaction of people getting metal, like finding metal for the first time and thinking ‘woah, where has this been my whole life?!’
“And knowing that there’s a whole history of metal, not just us but newer bands like Knocked Loose and Code Orange, older bands like Judas Priest and (Black) Sabbath, and everything in-between that made us love (metal) like Metallica and Iron Maiden and Slayer. There’s so much.
“Once you become a metal fan there’s so much to explore that it feels really good to be a cog in that machine. If that’s what we’re doing, which is giving people a peek inside a gigantic world that really is inclusive, but at the same time exclusive, then yeah, let’s do this man!”
Slipknot will tour the UK in 2020 taking in shows in Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Sheffield, Nottingham, Cardiff, Birmingham and London. The exact venues and dates will be released at a later time.