Slipknot fans rejoice! The Iowa band has announced a brand-new album, ‘The End, So Far’, out in September, with a new single accompanying the news titled ‘The Dying Song (Time to Sing), bundled in with ‘The Chapeltown Rag’, which has also been revealed to be part of the upcoming album.

The song opens with an ominous harmonized melody sung in Slipknot’s more melodious style. That intro, though it may be a tease for the chorus, is incredibly misleading as to what’s to come for ‘The Dying Song’. Immediately after the section is over, the song explodes into the verse, Corey Taylor now screaming the lyrics away in a cadence extremely similar to the song that introduced the band to the world, ‘(sic)’. This musical whiplash is extremely effective in properly conveying the brutality of the verse, with Corey Taylor somehow sounding twenty years rejuvenated. Seriously, this is the best the singer has sounded in a long, long time. It’s normal for harsh vocalists’ voices to degrade with time, and Corey has adapted wonderfully through the years by changing his style, but ‘The Dying Song’ proves that it might’ve been all style after all, time and age playing no part in the process. Other than his masterful delivery, the band takes the sound they’ve crafted over the last couple albums and builds atop it pleasantly. Some of the tune sounds a bit same-y when compared to their previous efforts, but such a trait can be good for a lot of listeners, especially Slipknot fans. 

With every album that has been released post their 2009 album ‘All Hope is Gone’, at least one of the nine members has gone on record describing the album as ‘Iowa meets Vol.3’, a comment on the blend of heavy grooves and melodic passages. While I enjoyed both albums that came since ‘All Hope is Gone’, I felt like that statement was a little misleading. With both new singles, ‘The Dying Song’ and ‘The Chapeltown Rag’, describing the tunes as previously described would be extremely appropriate. It’s heavy. It’s melodic. It’s Slipknot.

Author: Nicholas Gaudet

Music producer and writer from Dieppe, Canada.