Unauthorized Book About Rise Of SLIPKNOT And Creation Of 2001 Album 'Iowa' To Arrive In August

Little, Brown Book Group, a division of Hachette UK, has set an August 6, 2026 publication date For "Somewhere Between Screaming And Crying: Slipknot, Nu Metal And 9/11" from author Dan Franklin.

What if one album could capture the moment the world changed?
This is the gripping inside story of SLIPKNOT's "Iowa" album — 25 years on from its release — and how it became the sound of a generation on the brink.

"Somewhere Between Screaming And Crying" is the first book to fully unpack the rise of SLIPKNOT and the creation of their landmark 2001 album "Iowa" — a record that revolutionized heavy metal, and came to define not just a band, but the emotional atmosphere of the early 21st century.

Published to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the album's release, this is a gripping deep dive into how nine masked maniacs from Des Moines, Iowa, became one of the most controversial and culturally significant acts of their time.

Drawing on original interviews, first-hand reporting and extensive research, Franklin tells the inside story of a band on the brink — capturing the chaos of the studio, the extremity of their live shows, and the intense personal toll of fame, addiction, and creative pressures.

Crucially, the book also expands outward, placing SLIPKNOT within a wider cultural moment — tracing the rise of nu metal alongside the collapse of late-'90s optimism, from Woodstock '99 to the aftermath of 9/11, and explores how their music became a vessel for a generation's anger, alienation, and identity crisis. With nu metal more popular than ever today, the cycle is repeating.

At its heart, "Somewhere Between Screaming And Crying" asks a bigger, more troubling question: what happens when art doesn't just reflect chaos — but seems to generate it?

"Iowa" went on to become a huge international success, spawning hits including "Disasterpiece", "The Heretic Anthem", "People = Shit" and "Left Behind".

Regarding what SLIPKNOT was trying to achieve with "Iowa", frontman Corey Taylor told Metal Hammer that the band did not want to put out a rehash of its 1999 self-titled debut and the LP's hit single "Wait And Bleed".

"Everyone and their mom was trying to get us to write ten more 'Wait And Bleed's, but fuck you, we've already done that," he said. "Why would we want to do it again?

"For us, it was really about being rabid, being wasted, and still being young enough to back it up," he explained. "Our whole goal was to go in and make this dense, destructive album. We had no idea how destructive it was going to be."

Taylor believes SLIPKNOT more than accomplished its goal with "Iowa". He told Metal Hammer: "You can hear the bile in it, you can hear the frenetic passion for what we were trying to do. I think we overshot it… I think we bypassed what we were trying to do and achieved something completely different, which was to create the heaviest album that would be picked up by a popular audience who didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into."

Dan Franklin is a heavy-music writer, and author of "Heavy: How Metal Changes The Way We See The World" (Constable/Little, Brown, 2020) and "Come My Fanatics: A Journey Into The World Of Electric Wizard" (White Rabbit/Orion, 2023). "Somewhere Between Screaming and Crying" is the third instalment in this loose trilogy about heavy music.