Stop Press! Slipknot Gets Fresh Masks!

Not scheduled to pull a KISS, unfortunately.

By Fred Mills

Tomorrow, July 1, everyone’s favorite evil clowns Slipknot will dump their played-out costumes and don new ones. The Iowa mook merchants plan to unveil their new imagery in an exclusive partnership with AOL MusicThe event is being billed somewhat dubiously as a “highly anticipated debut” but hey, it’s just promotion for Slipknot’s new album, All Hope Is Gone, due from Roadrunner on August 26, so we’re  not frettin’ the hype. Hey, we were really thinking they’d pull a KISS and ditch the masks altogether for a much-needed cred grab, but no such luck.

“Masks,” writes the band’s handlers, “are an integral part of the band’s identity and to reflect this point, AOL Music’s Spinner.com will host a retrospective photo gallery of Slipknot masks throughout their career, spanning all three previous albums and including the most recent controversial ‘Purgatory Masks.’ The Slipknot mask unveiling will be featured on the main page of Spinner.com worldwide for 24 hours.”

You might have thought (hoped? prayed?) Slipknot had gone away; after all, it’s been four years since their last studio album, 2004’s Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), although in that interim they also released a live album and documentary CD. Never fear: it’s clown time again. Literally.

This is not Slipknot, but if they took off their masks it might as well be:

This is actually Slipknot: