Nine-piece heavy metal band Slipknot recently topped a poll conducted by Metal Hammer to find the best debut album released in the last 25 years, receiving a staggering 32% of votes.
To celebrate its 25th anniversary, British metal magazine Metal Hammer asked readers to name their favourite debut album recently, with the controversial jumpsuit-laden Slipknot topping the poll with their self-titled 1999 offering Slipknot. Featuring such hit songs as ‘Wait and Bleed‘ and ‘Spit It Out‘, Slipknot was the band’s first album released on a major label, issued by Roadrunner Records in June 1999. The record charted fairly averagely around the world, but catapulted the band into the international spotlight as one of the heaviest, craziest and most impressive bands around.
Instantly controversial, Slipknot was reissued six months later after a claim of copyright infringement was brought by the author of a story which was said to have inspired the song ‘Purity’. The album has remained legendary among fans of the band, and of the genre in general, and it was clearly an important piece in the puzzle of rock music development (including ‘nu metal’) in the early 2000s. In 2009 the band celebrated the tenth anniversary of the release of Slipknot, reissuing the album in remastered and expanded form, much to the delight of their millions of fans (‘maggots’) all over the world.
In the Metal Hammer poll, Korn’s self-titled debut album took second place, just 0.04% ahead of the legendary Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction. Also featured in the top ten were System of a Down, Linkin Park and Rage Against the Machine.
What are your favourite debut albums of the last 25 years? One feels an obligation to recognise Definitely Maybe by Oasis, Wolfmother’s self-titled debut and Permission to Land by The Darkness to name a few, and I would also put CKY’s Volume 1 out there to stir things up. In terms of metal, though, I would be tempted to agree with the decision of the readers of Metal Hammer.
