Metal Anarchy

During a recent interview with All Things Music, Corey Taylor further commented on signing with BMG and launching his own imprint Decibel Cooper. The frontman expressed his dissatisfaction with Roadrunner Records, saying they didn’t even try to push his first solo album.

Taylor said the following when asked if Slipknot’s departure from Roadrunner was “weird” and “refreshing”:

“Yeah. Honestly, it’s all of that. But there’s also this moment… and even after all these years, for me, there’s this moment where it’s kind of daunting as well. You’re, like, ‘Fuck.’ This feels like — not starting over again, but now you have to create bonds with a whole new group of people. But the rad thing about BMG is just how into everything I am and everything I do they are. Which is refreshing, because probably for about 10 years Roadrunner has not been that. Roadrunner was completely antithetical when it came to that stuff. They just had become this company that we didn’t even recognize anymore. So when our contract came up, we were, like, ‘1-800 See ya! I’m done with you.’ Because it had turned into a bunch of people we didn’t know.

They did this massive cull back in, like, I wanna say it was 2012. It was the ‘great firing.’ And they fired everyone we knew, everyone we had started out with… Jonas [Nachsin], the president, gone. By this time, Cees [Wessels], the old owner, was gone. So Roadrunner went from this juggernaut of a metal company to a hallway at Warner Brothers. I saw it with my own eyes. I was just, like, ‘Wow! Where did this go?’ It just became this thing that they owned the catalog. And that was it. They didn’t care. And the people who were left didn’t really care about us. So it really became this thing where we had to kind of rise to the challenge on that. And all kudos to our management company, 5B, because they really created all of these different departments around us to help us keep going. If it wasn’t for 5B, man, we would have been stalled; let’s put it that way. So we were able to continue going, really kind of almost in a weird, corporate DIY way.

So when the time came to do my solo thing, Roadrunner almost halfheartedly put the first album out. Didn’t push it. It’s insane that we even did what we could with that, even with the pandemic going on, because they didn’t care. So when the time came to kind of re-up with Roadrunner, they were, like, ‘If you wanna go somewhere else, we won’t stop you.’ I was, like, ‘That’s all I needed to hear, dude.’ I was, like, ‘Thanks for that.’”

He continued when asked if it was “shocking” to hear Roadrunner say that:

“Not really — not when you think about the fact that they don’t care. They didn’t care about us. Like I said, it was a totally different group of people. They had nothing to do with getting us there; they had nothing to do with keeping us there; so they didn’t really want us to stay there. So I was, like, ‘All right. Whatever.’ So then BMG comes in hot, dude, and they were, like… It felt like the old days of Roadrunner. Their excitement, their passion, the fact that they’re a global company… And they were, like, ‘We’re gonna make this album not only a priority but we are going to get behind this one hundred percent.’ And I was just, like, ‘You had me at ‘hello.’ Let’s do this.”

[via Blabbermouth]