10 Best Rock Album Music Covers Of The 2000s

All of Slipknot's studio albums follow a similar theme when it comes to their artwork. Dark colours, horror iconography, the prominence of the band's masks, you know what you're getting yourself into pretty quickly. Except Iowa, which just has a goat on it for some reason.

For their third album, the appropriately titled Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), the band really hit it out of the park. The record, which contained the songs Duality, Vermillion, and Before I Forget, is illustrated by a special mask designed by Shawn "Clown" Crahan himself.

Called the maggot mask (after a term coined for Slipknot's fans), the headpiece features prominently in the Vermillion music video. You can also buy replicas of it as official merchandise, because even boiler suit-wearing psychopaths need to get paid.

Masks are such an important part of Slipknot's identity, that it was only a matter of time before one took centre stage on an album cover.vThe jarring nature of the close-up shot, combined with the ominous lighting and less-than-friendly-looking zipper attached to ol' maggot, gets across the nightmarish musical mix that anyone listening to this album is about to behold.