Iowa by Slipknot

Iowa, Slipknot's second album, hit on Roadrunner on August 28, 2001, and it's the sound of nine men from Des Moines turning the pressure of a hit debut into something uglier and more frightening. Named for the home state they call one of their deepest sources of inspiration, it was produced by the band with Ross Robinson during what the members later called the darkest stretch of their career, with relationships inside the camp fraying badly.

You can hear it. Corey Taylor howls, Joey Jordison's drums and Paul Gray's bass lock into a blur, Mick Thomson and Jim Root, on his first full Slipknot album, grind out riffs more technical than anything on the debut, and Shawn Crahan, Chris Fehn, Craig Jones and Sid Wilson thicken the murk. "Left Behind" and "My Plague" drew Grammy nominations, "Disasterpiece" and "The Heretic Anthem" rank among their best-known songs, and the album went top ten in several countries and platinum in three.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.