Paul Grey, Rest in Peace

While the more ignorant amongst us will play down the significance of this death in the wake of Ronnie James Dio’s passing, it’s imperative that you consider that Slipknot are unarguably one of the most important metal bands of the past 15 years and one that the vast majority of recruits to the metal cause over the past 10 years will hold dear to their hearts. That Slipknot are a band that are still in their relative infancy and have been robbed of one of their founding members, hurts in a way that is virtually impossible to put into words on this blog.

Slipknot are one of the few bands that have managed to break the ‘headline-status’ monopoly of the old school. A band that have broken through and been carried to the very top of the metal food-chain through fan power and classic album after classic album, to the point that Slipknot can truly stake a claim to be this generations Iron Maiden or Metallica.

Their set at last year’s Download festival was a set that will live on in the memory of every single person who was there. In a year that celebrates 30 years of Donington as one of the premier metal stamping grounds, this was one of the very best shows that the venue had ever seen. Fuck, it brings about goosebumps just thinking about that intro to ‘Duality’. That it will be the last performance from the original Slipknot line-up on British soil is bittersweet on the grandest of scales.

Paul Gray may not have had the media-profile of some of his bandmates but he was an integral part of every single one of those moments, moments that’ll live with me, and whoever was there to witness them, forever. He was one of ‘the nine’. When you’ve seen a band create something that has and will become the stuff of legends (at times right before your eyes) and now a massive component of that is no longer with us, it’s heart-breaking. Really fucking heart-breaking.

Our thoughts and well-wishes go out to his family and bandmates at this difficult time.

The biggest tribute we can pay Paul is that his influence on one of the most important rock bands of this generation is one that is unquestionable and that will live on in the hearts and experiences of millions of metalheads across the planet.