All Hope is Lost is Slipknot’s fourth full-length album, which came out in 2008. They would go on to release .5 The Gray Chapter next. This album was released in 2015 and would be the last release other than a documentary called Day of the Gusano that would showcase their tour and have a full set of concerts for listening. These live performances would be put together into an “album” called Day of the Gusano (Live). Leaving into silence as the lead singer Corey Taylor would go to work on his other band Stone Sour.

This silence was soon ended by the release of All Out Life, a single that was released on Halloween day 2018. This led to fans beginning a new “hype-train” towards their new full album that is rumored to release sometime in 2019. But in a sort of way to hold the fans over until the rumored release, they announced that on December 7, 2018, there would be a reissue of their critically acclaimed album All Hope is Gone.

This album would include new artwork, remastering of the songs, and the full Madison Square Garden (referred as MSG) live show they did back in 2009. This was stated by the band’s official Twitter account, “The ‘All Hope Is Gone’ 10th Anniversary Edition will arrive December 7th featuring re-imagined artwork and live bonus disk containing our 2009 headline set at Madison Square Garden.”

Now, to the actual album. This album is consisting of all the same songs that were on the original album, such as Psychosocial and Dead Memories with the new re-imagined artwork for the album’s 10th anniversary. This album was the band’s very first chart-topper.

It was supposed to have been remastered, but since the album isn’t very dated and the audio was good, to begin with, it is not very noticeable. The bonus CD has the full live set at Madison Square Garden where they headlined on February 5, 2009. But it is very weirdly mixed and doesn’t always work very well. Sometimes the crowd’s cheering is overshadowing the actual music, and sometimes the instruments overshadow the singing. The album also has the new artwork. But this artwork seems almost like a screenshot of the Psychosocial music video.

Even though the mixing isn’t the best, this live set is probably the most sentimental to the band since this kind of shows that they “made it.” This is the first time they would headline at such a large venue. This also was very soon after they topped charts around the world with this record-setting album.

Jett Hahn, a student of Taylorsville High School says, “I thought it was very good. A solid reissue for sure.” He was the actual fan portion of the interviews. He has listened to the entire album

and even has favorites, which were Psychosocial, Gehenna, and Sulfur.

DeNelle Jacobson of Dixie State University says,” Can I turn this off? I can’t listen to this.” She was the non-fan portion of the interviews. She also didn’t listen past the first few seconds of the first real song Gematria (The Killing Name).

Eli Guevara of Kearns High School said, “I was okay, I guess. It was a little too long though.” Eli is a fan of the genre and usually listens to music that is similar. He listened to the entire 2-and-a-half-hour-long album.

All in all, the album is a solid reissue of their classic album All Hope is Gone. The new cover art is unique, created by Shawn “Clown” Crahan (one of the band’s drummers). The digital remasters, however, is hardly noticeable as the original had already decent audio quality. Finally, the audio quality is lackluster with the live portion of the album, which consisted of their full live set at Madison Square Garden in 2009.

But with half of the album being the same thing rehashed with nearly identical qualities to the original, this will only get a 6 out of 10.