Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. - Recording and Production

Recording and Production

In late 1995 Slipknot and producer Sean McMahon entered SR Audio, a studio in the band's home town of Des Moines, Iowa to work on what they intended to be their debut album. Retrospectively McMahon said that the band was "driven" because they spent the majority of their time in the studio for the seven months it took to produce the album. Slipknot self-financed the production, which came to an estimated $40,000. The band expressed how much of a learning process this time was with it being the first time they had recorded their music, specifically the additional percussion elements were challenging to capture. The band were aiming for a tribal sound but encountered problems including minuscule timing errors and during this period they refined their percussive sound, they experimented with erecting walls to isolate the drums and re-arranging parts. In February 1996 during the mixing process, guitarist Donnie Steele decided to leave the band for religious reasons, as a result Craig Jones joined the band to fill the spot. However the band realized that they were incorporating too many samples on their recordings and could not produce these sounds live. In order to solve this problem Jones moved to full time sampler and Mick Thomson joined as a guitarist. Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. was released on October 31, 1996 with a release party at The Safari, a local club where the band played a lot of their earliest gigs.