The untold story of Slipknot’s “Iowa” is getting a book — out this August
Twenty-five years after its release, “Iowa” — the album that rewired heavy metal and became the sound of a generation in crisis — is getting its first full-length investigation. “Somewhere Between Screaming And Crying: Slipknot, Nu Metal And 9/11” by journalist and music writer Dan Franklin is due August 6, 2026, published by Little, Brown Book Group, a division of Hachette UK.
The book is the first to fully unpack both the rise of Slipknot and the making of their landmark 2001 record — how nine masked outsiders from Des Moines became one of the most controversial and culturally significant acts of their time. Drawing on original interviews, first-hand reporting and extensive research, Franklin reconstructs the chaos of the recording sessions, the extremity of the band’s live shows, and the personal toll exacted by fame, addiction and relentless creative pressure.
Frontman Corey Taylor once explained the band’s mindset going into “Iowa” in an interview with Metal Hammer: “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. Why would we want to do it again?” On what they actually achieved, Taylor was equally blunt: ‘I think we overshot it. I think we bypassed what we were trying to do and achieved something completely different — we created the heaviest album that would be picked up by a popular audience who didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into.’
But “Somewhere Between Screaming And Crying” is more than a band biography. Franklin places “Iowa” inside a wider cultural rupture: the surge of nu metal, the collapse of late-'90s optimism, Woodstock '99, and the aftermath of 9/11 — arguing that the album became a vessel for a generation’s anger and alienation. At its core, the book poses an unsettling question: what happens when art doesn’t just reflect chaos, but seems to generate it? The book is the third instalment in Franklin’s loose trilogy on heavy music, following “Heavy” (2020) and “Come My Fanatics” (2023).
