Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind: Every Song Ranked From Worst To Best

Slipknot are back.

Five years after their last studio release, the Iowan ninesome have returned to metal's forefront with We Are Not Your Kind - an album brimming with rage, power, experimentation, and life.

Corey Taylor promised an album that pushed the band's core sound to its limits without breaking them entirely. In June, he told BBC Radio 1's Daniel P. Carter that "there has to be a touchstone. You can go as far out as you want, but you have to be able to pull them back to the feeling that made them fans in the first place." An experimenting band's identity must remain intact, basically. Slipknot have accomplished this on WANYK.

It's the band's strongest record since 2004's Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) and one that absolutely belongs alongside self-titled and Iowa in the career-best conversation. It is the sound of a band rebounding spectacularly from two disappointing releases, and recovering much of their lost menace on a brawny, beautiful record sure to finish high on many an Album of the Year list.

Far more than a mere collection of tracks, WANYK is a rich, cohesive, full-album experience. This makes separating its songs tough, so buckle up...

Ranking We Are Not Your Kind's interludes against full-length songs is tough. They exist to bridge gaps, not stand out on their own, and that almost necessitates their low positioning.

"Death Because of Death" works. It serves its purpose. It takes WANYK from the ugliness of "Birth of the Cruel" to the crushing, arena-sized "Nero Forte" seamlessly and while it doesn't stand out, it wasn't calibrated to.

Starting off sounding like a strangled 16-bit videogame soundtrack, it soon gives way to tribal drums and the haunting "death because of, death because of you" mantra. It maintains the album's overall tone in a way that may not have been possible had the tracks before and after fed into each other directly.

But it's still an interlude.