While ranking his favorite Slipknot albums over at Noisey, vocalist Corey Taylor tells a fantastic story about the making of their self-titled album and how the band took matters into their own hands.

Said Taylor, on their 1999 debut album on Road Runner Records:

“I don’t know if anyone’s ever told this story, but Clown, Joey, and Ross Robinson broke into the studio where the master tapes were, because we weren’t liking the mixes we were getting. They broke in, stole the tapes, and mixed it themselves! [Laughs] I think Paul was there too. I had to go back to Iowa to go back to work, and I get a call from Clown: “By the way, we committed grand larceny, we just stole our own fucking album.” And they sat down and mixed it because no one else understood it. When you’re the first, no one knows. There’s not track record for it. So we’d get these shitty fucking mixes that were either too thin, too bass-laden. People didn’t understand what this noise was. So we ended up mixing it ourselves, man.”

Taylor said the band didn’t have high hopes for the release; “our highest expectation was that we were maybe a band that sold 200,000 albums.” The album was certified Platinum in the US barely a year later, and has since gone double Platinum.

Slipknot will hit the road with Hatebreed later this month, then embark on a massive summer tour with Lamb Of God, Bullet For My Valentine, and Motionless In White.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1zCN0YhW1s[/youtube]

(via Noisey)