Mick Thomson

Mick Thomson — number 7 — has been Slipknot's guitarist since 1996, and is one of the two members responsible for the wall of sound that holds the band up. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1973, he was in the line-up that recorded the whole discography, from the 1999 debut to The End, So Far (2022). His role is weight, not display. Thomson plays in lowered tunings, with a dense tone and an extremely rigid picking attack, and puts rhythmic precision above any flourish. In a group where nine people produce sound at once, the guitar cannot occupy free melodic space — it has to fit between the drums, the percussionists and the samples with millimetric exactness, and it is that discipline that makes Iowa (2001) sound like a solid block rather than a pile-up of noise. With Jim Root he forms a guitar pair that almost never harmonises in the traditional sense: the two play the same thing, doubled, to gain mass. It is a use of arrangement opposite to that of classic heavy metal, and part of what separates Slipknot from its contemporaries. Alongside Corey Taylor, Shawn Crahan and Sid Wilson, he is one of the longest-serving members of the band.