Released in May last year, Slipknot‘s song “Unsainted” was an earth-shaking event, the much-hyped lead single off the Iowan metal powerhouse’s highly anticipated sixth album, We Are Not Your Kind. Featuring eerie backing choirs and an infectious pop-leaning chorus, the song was an immediate smash hit, and it arrived with an equally momentous — and creepy as all hell — music video that unveiled the metal mad men’s new outfits and masks, including singer Corey Taylor’s polarizing face-covering, which was designed by horror-movie special FX legend Tom Savini. The clip was directed by the band’s percussionist, co-founder, conceptualist and visual mastermind M. Shawn Crahan, and in commemoration of the video’s one-year anniversary, the ‘Knot have offered up a new behind-the-scenes mini-doc on its making. Watch below.
Like every other touring band, Slipknot are currently sidelined from the road due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting restrictions involving public gathering. The Nine were recently compelled to cancel all of their summer 2020 live dates, including the “Knotfest Roadshow” tour with A Day to Remember, Underoath and Code Orange, as well as Knotfest U.K. and the what was to have been the first-ever Knotfest at Sea cruise.
In the meantime, “Unsainted” continues to gain traction, having amassed over 75 millions views on YouTube. “Before we even started writing this record, Clown had been like, ‘I want to get a choir,'” Slipknot guitarist Jim Root said to Kerrang! of the song. “He was thinking in terms of a children’s choir, like a Pink Floyd The Wall kind of thing, but we ended up getting a regular choir, and they took a version of the melody line from the original guitar line that started the demo song, which is a variation of the chorus riff. The choir did what they did, and to me it turned out to be pretty epic. I heard someone compare it to ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ by the Rolling Stones, and I think that’s a pretty ambitious comparison, but I’ll certainly take it.”
