Slipknot’s Duality has been streamed on Spotify one-billion times.
Iowa’s nine-man wrecking crew crossed the threshold with their 2004 single, taken from third album Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses, earlier this week. It’s their first song to reach the 10-digit mark, with their next-most popular track being 2008’s Psychosocial with 765 million streams.
Slipknot released Duality as a single on May 4, 2004, three weeks before Vol. 3 came out. It was their first single since My Plague in 2002 and accompanied by a now-famous video of the band playing to 350 marauding fans in a Des Moines, Iowa home.
In April 2004, it was reported that the family who owned the house were seeking between $300,000 and $500,000 from Slipknot, due to the extent of damage the house suffered during the shoot. They were eventually handed $50,000 by record label Roadrunner.
Guitarist Jim Root later told Metal Injection: “[My] understanding was that the people who owned the house used it as an income property, so they were going to remodel anyway. To what extent, I don’t know, but they’re definitely going to be remodelling now!”
Vol. 3 was recorded at The Mansion in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, California between 2003 and 2004, with the sessions being overseen by vaunted producer Rick Rubin. The writing and tracking were troubled, as Corey Taylor told Loudwire in 2015.
“The crazy thing about the first three months [in the studio]: not only was I fucked up, everybody was fucked up,” he explained. “We were kinda in and out. We weren’t hanging together, we weren’t working on anything together. Slow but surely, I quit drinking and was a little more involved, and the music started coming together.”
Duality reached number one on the UK Rock & Metal chart and has since been certified Platinum in multiple markets, including Canada (three times), New Zealand (twice), Austria, the UK and Portugal. Vol. 3 has gone Platinum in Canada (twice), plus the US, the UK, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand.
Slipknot are currently enjoying some time off from the road but may be busy working on new music. Last year, the band teased the release of a single called Long May You Die, but it’s yet to see the light of day.
Also, percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan continued the lengthy build-up to the band’s Look Outside Your Window album in January, arguing that the project – composed of downtempo rock songs recorded simultaneously to 2008’s All Hope Is Gone – is in fact not a Slipknot release at all.
