“Vermilion” by Slipknot

"Vermilion" came off Slipknot's third album, Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), as its second single, and it grew out of a demo Paul Gray and Joey Jordison had cooked up. Jordison wrote most of the music and Gray put together the middle section; when Corey Taylor heard it, he says, all he could see was red, and he wrote from inside a stalker's head, chasing that desperate, dark urgency and the heat of jealous rage.

Rick Rubin produced, Greg Fidelman recorded and mixed, and the song is credited to all eight members. The story didn't end there: "Vermilion Pt. 2" picks it up where this one leaves off. Onstage the band swaps its usual masks for death masks, real casts of each member's face, though on the All Hope Is Gone tour only Craig Jones and Paul Gray wore theirs for it.

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