We Are Not Your Kind

Jim Root and Shawn Crahan began writing in early 2017, and Crahan had spoken of wanting an art record in the vein of The Wall or Sgt. Pepper. The band wrote and recorded 22 songs and 26 interludes in all. Recording began in November 2018 at EastWest Studios in Hollywood with Greg Fidelman, who had produced .5: The Gray Chapter, and finished by April 2019. Root said the band spent a long time on the demos and then tracked the songs as a band, with and without a click track, using the takes without. The album opens with a short piece, Insert Coin, and includes two more under a minute and a half, Death Because of Death and What's Next.

Unsainted, released on 16 May 2019, features the Angel City Chorale and peaked at number ten on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart. Its video revealed the band's new masks and passed 4.7 million views in its first day. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and holds a Metacritic score of 89 from 14 critic scores. Pitchfork said Solway Firth was perhaps the most intense track of the band's career, and Loudwire's Jon Wiederhorn wrote that Slipknot had "broadly expanded their parameters." Blabbermouth called it a shining gem in the band's crown.