Slipknot Confirm 25th Anniversary 'Iowa' Tour Celebration
The masked nine-piece mark two-and-a-half decades of chaos with a North American anniversary trek.
Slipknot will spend 2027 celebrating the 25th anniversary of Iowa with a full North American run, playing the landmark album front to back on select nights. The band promised the most destructive stage show they've ever mounted — which, for Slipknot, is saying something, and the routing suggests they mean it: the tour is being built as an arena run rather than the festival-headlining dates the band has favored for the last decade. The announcement comes on the heels of the band's 2026 summer festival headline run, which closed Aftershock to 130,000 people and reminded every one of them why the Iowa nine are still the standard for festival-headlining metal.
Iowa is the record that turned Slipknot from a cult into a movement, and the anniversary tour leans all the way into it. Released in August 2001, the album arrived as the heaviest, ugliest, most uncompromising record a major label had ever put out — a double LP that ran 67 minutes, opened with a song called 'People = S4it,' and ended with a fifteen-minute noise piece called 'Iowa' that most of the audience never made it to. It debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, sold over a million copies, and proved that a band in masks from Des Moines could sell out arenas without a single radio single. The 25th anniversary tour is the first time the band has played the record in full since the 2001-2002 cycle, and the working setlist runs the whole album in order, followed by a greatest-hits set drawn from the rest of the catalog.
The production is the part the band has been loudest about. Corey Taylor, in the announcement interview, promised 'the most insane thing we have ever done,' which is a high bar — the band's 2019 Knotfest sets featured a rotating drum riser that rose 30 feet into the air, and the 2026 Aftershock set had Shawn 'Clown' Crahan crowd-surfing inside a clear plastic ball. The 2027 production is rumored to include a full-scale replica of the Iowa album cover — the band's masked faces on a blood-red stage — and a pyro rig that the band has been testing at the Knotfest site in Iowa. The masks for the run have been redesigned: Taylor confirmed the band will wear updated versions of the original 2001 masks for the Iowa-set portion of the show, before changing into the modern masks for the greatest-hits set.
Taylor's voice on the 2026 festival run suggested he has fully recovered from the 2021 spinal surgery that nearly ended his career, and the band has confirmed he will do the full two-set show on every night of the run. The band has also confirmed the full nine-piece lineup for the tour — a reunion of the long-running lineup, with Sid Wilson, Joey Jordison's replacement Jay Weinberg on drums, and the percussion trio of Crahan, Chris Fehn's replacement Michael Pfaff, and new addition (since 2023) Zac Rao. The tour is the first time the full nine will be on the road together since the 2019 cycle, and the band has made no secret it is treating the run as a reunion as much as an anniversary.
The Iowa cycle is the record that turned Slipknot from a cult into a movement; the anniversary tour leans all the way into it. Tickets at the official box office below — the Northeast dates are expected to sell through the fastest, and the band has added second nights in three markets based on the early demand.