Get ready for a look back at a strange world: 2001 was a different time. A time of baggy jeans, wallets on chains, and a strangely heavy, angry, and proudly stupid style of music that inexplicably became mainstream. It was the era of Nu-Metal: a subgenre now so hated and disgraced that even those of us who were fans are happy to pretend it all just never happened.

For myself and my brother Donal, one of our key memories of this bizarre time is the book Slipknot: Behind The Sickness Inside The Masks. It’s an absurd, juvenile, but breathlessly genuine time capsule of an age that has yet to be enshrined in any sort of nostalgic movement. We loved this book as teenagers and we’re returning to it now.

Slipknot were perhaps the breakout stars of the Nu-Metal era and this book chronicles them at the height of their intensity and bombastic ridiculousness. Get ready for dead crows in jars, shitting on stage, dicks for noses, and rotting cow heads. We discuss Nu-Metal in general, the nature of nostalgia, and why Metallica’s St Anger was terrible.

Live from lockdown, from the cabin in the woods in West Cork and lovely Montreal, Quebec, this is Wide Atlantic Weird; this episode: What You Did Not Create: Slipknot And Nu-Metal Nostalgia.