“I started playing $150 Ibanez guitars because onstage I would take damage… Clown used to use metal bars. We were very unsafe”: Mick Thomson reflects on 25 years of Slipknot’s incendiary debut – and what it was like to see his solos erased

Mick Thomson of Slipknot wears a mask and a red boiler suit as he plays his ESP signature model in this portrait against a black background.
(Image credit: Future / Jonathan Weiner)

It was 25 years ago that Slipknot dropped their self-titled debut album on Roadrunner Records.

And if the idea of a band made up of nine masked men in red jumpsuits playing a highly combustible and chaotic strain of heavy metal – one that mashed together everything from thrash and death, to punk and hardcore, to hip-hop and sampled sounds, all of it laced with a healthy dose of atmospheric weirdness and straight-up ear-bleeding noise – would not only still be around a quarter-century later, but also be a multi-platinum, arena-dwelling, festival-headlining behemoth sounded, well, crazy? You wouldn’t be the only one to think so.

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Richard Bienstock

Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.