Slipknot Perform ‘The Chapeltown Rag’ Live for the First Time
Slipknot performed their brand new single, "The Chapeltown Rag" live for the first time last night (Nov. 5) at Knotfest in Los Angeles. The concert was filmed as a livestream and aired today. You can watch the video of the performance below.
The concert took place at the Bank of California Stadium and featured support from Bring Me the Horizon, Killswitch Engage, Fever 333, Code Orange, Vended and Corey Taylor's wife Alicia Taylor's dance group Cherry Bombs. The performance was also the band's first time headlining a stadium.
"It's classic Slipknot," Taylor says about the track. "And it's frenetic. But lyrically, it's coming from a point of talking about the various manipulations that can happen when social media meets media itself. And the different ways that these manipulations can try to pull us in different directions, in the fact that we're all becoming addicts to it, which is very, very dangerous."
The song is inspired by the Netflix documentary The Ripper, which is about the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer who murdered several women in the West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, suburb of Chapeltown in the late 1970s.
The performance also marked the first time drummer Jay Weinberg wore his updated mask on stage. Taylor spoke about the significance of the masks on an episode of VICE's "The Therapist."
"With Slipknot, at least for most of us in the band, the mask is part of the art — it's not just the visual and the shock; it's a representation of who I am in that album. So, for me, it's as natural as having a different hairstyle for one album and tour cycle, wearing different clothes for an album and tour cycle. It's a part of the dynamic. It's one of the things that you look forward to. Not just writing the songs, not just putting the music together, not just putting the visuals together, but what… who am I in this album?"
Slipknot's last album, We Are Not Your Kind was released in 2019. Shawn Crahan, otherwise known as Clown, recently sat down with Forbes and teased a new album in the works. It will officially be the last Slipknot record with Roadrunner Records.
In an interview with Minneapolis radio station 93X (transcribed by Blabbermouth), Clown reiterated a recent claim he made about the upcoming material and said, "I believe that this album is… It's God music, man. It's the center of the beast for me. This is a whole other element."