Ho99o9 have revealed what it’s like making a song with Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor.
In 2022, the New Jersey grime-punk duo released the track Bite My Face from their album Skin, which featured guest vocals from Taylor. Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, singer/instrumentalist Yeti Bones says that the team-up was a dream come true.
“That collab was a dream,” the musician tells us. “You might tour with your favourite musicians, but tours come and go. A song lasts forever! 60 years from now, I can look back and go, ‘I did a song with the dude from fucking Slipknot! And that shit was good!’”
Discussing what Taylor was like to work with, he continues: “Corey was a genuine human being and a down-ass motherfucker. That’s the type of people I wanna be around: people who genuinely fuck with me. I don’t want to do anything with nobody that’s half-assed, or because our agents put us together.”
The musician also reveals that Taylor went beyond the call of duty, not just contributing to the chorus like he was asked to, but adding his voice to the breakdown towards the end of the song as well.
“We laid down our verses and there was just a chorus gap left,” he explains. “It was a chorus and a breakdown, and the breakdown I didn’t even tell him to touch! When he sent it back, I was like, ‘Oh! We got the Slipknot [growling]! And then, at the breakdown at the end, I was like, ‘You didn’t even need to go that hard!’”
Bite My Face came out in March 2022, and Ho99o9, composed of Yeti Bones and vocalist theOGM, toured North America with Slipknot and Cypress Hill from May to June the same year. Yeti Bones explains that Taylor discovered Ho99o9 through a mutual friend, as well as his wife Alicia and the fact that Ho99o9 have sampled Slipknot in the past.
He remembers: “At the time, his wife, who he’s with right now, was a fan of The Prodigy, and we have a song with The Prodigy [2018’s Fight Fire With Fire]. She got wind of us through the Prodigy feature and was telling him, like, ‘Yo, you need to check it out!’ The mutual friend was like, ‘Yo, you need to check it out.’
“And then, last but not leastly, we have an EP called Cyber Cop and on a song called Mega City Nine, we sampled two Slipknot songs and made it one beat. From those three things, he got a whole fucking ear full of people, and music, being like, ‘Check this band out!’”
Ho99o9 released their new album, Tomorrow We Escape, via Deathkult in September. The pair are currently touring North America and will play at The Majestic Theatre in Detroit tonight (November 4). In February and March, they’ll play across Europe.
Meanwhile, Slipknot are enjoying some downtime after spending much of 2024 touring to celebrate 25 years of their self-titled debut album. The nine-piece may be on the cusp of putting out new music, having previously teased a single called Long May You Die and the release of their long-delayed rock project, Look Outside Your Window. Drummer Eloy Casagrande revealed last month that the band are currently “exchanging guitar riffs [and] drum beats”.
