Yesterday, nine-skulled death worm Slipknot released “The Chapeltown Rag,” their first new track since the 2019 release of We Are Not Your Kind. Now, the band have given the song its live debut as part of their headlining set at last night’s massive Knotfest LA show, footage of which you can watch here.
What fans will immediately notice in the video below is that Slipknot seem to be taking their time to get this one right. “The Chapeltown Rag” isn’t a typical single with a singalong chorus that fans can easily be sucked into; the track is an angry mid-album Slipknot song, and as such has a little more to do with death metal than it does with nu-metal. Maybe that’s why the band come off as a bit more focused and stationary than one might be used to. Clown and Tortilla Man seem to be really feeding off of each other, and Corey Taylor is putting a lot of his back and shoulders into every bellow. These dudes have to concentrate to nail a song with this many knuckles and elbows.
Check out the live debut of “The Chapeltown Rag” below:
For those of you who haven’t heard it yet, the studio version of “The Chapeltown Rag” can be streamed below. Gnarly and overflowing with bile, the song channels the fucked-up Slipknot of old rather than the hooky, more polished incarnation of the band we know today.
“It’s classic Slipknot,” says Taylor of the track. “And it’s frenetic. But lyrically, it’s coming from a point of talking about the various manipulations that can happen when social media meets media itself. And the different ways that these manipulations can try to pull us in different directions, in the fact that we’re all becoming addicts to it, which is very, very dangerous.”
Listen to “The Chapeltown Rag” in all its glory below:
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Words by Chris Krovatin
