Songfacts®:

• This song refers to the crimes of Peter Sutcliffe, better known as the "Yorkshire Ripper." Although the English serial killer's 13 murders in the late 1970s spanned Yorkshire and Manchester, many of his attacks took place in the Leeds suburb of Chapeltown.
• Corey Taylor wrote the lyrics after watching a Netflix documentary about the Yorkshire Ripper called The Ripper. As he watched, Taylor learned of the police's mistaken hypothesis that the murderer was motivated by a deep loathing of prostitutes. Their investigation soon became about the moral behavior and lives of the victims, rather than the criminality of the serial killer. The police didn't arrest Sutcliffe until five years and three months after his first known murder victim.
  
  "They wasted all this time," Taylor sighed to Knotfest. "All this money, all these resources - all because they refused to be wrong. Now what does that sound like in this day and age?"
• After Taylor watched The Ripper the Netflix algorithm started recommending other serial killer documentaries. The way it tried to steer the Slipknot frontman to programs about violence got him thinking. He wrote "The Chapeltown Rag" about the destructive intersection of serial killers, distorted mass media and self-discovery in social media.
  
  "Lyrically, it's coming from a point of talking about the various manipulations that can happen when social media meets media itself," Taylor told Knotfest. "And the different ways that these manipulations can try to pull us in different directions, in the fact that we're all becoming addicts to it, which is very, very dangerous."
• The chorus finds Taylor experimenting with vocal approaches he'd never properly tried before. "I wasn't even sure if that part was going to be the chorus," he said. "But I just love the way that the chord progression lent itself this weird, chromatic, minor vibe to it, which I had never really done before. I played with it on 'Vermilion' years ago, but I had never really given it a little more aggression. The harmony that I created for it was just so f---ing weird as well that it just gives it that slight dissonant vibe, but it's also very, very melodic and hummable."
• Joe Baressi co-produced this punishing chugger with Slipknot. Baressi had previously worked with Avenged Sevenfold, Queens of the Stone Age, Chevelle, and Coheed and Cambria.
• Slipknot performed the song live for the first time on November 5, 2021 at Knotfest Los Angeles. The band livestreamed the event as it happened, giving fans access to their performance.
• Over six years after Peter Sutcliffe's first murder victim, South Yorkshire Police arrested him by chance in January 1981 for driving with false number plates. Convicted of 13 murders, Sutcliffe was jailed for life. Here are a couple more songs inspired by the infamous serial killer.
  
  "Killer on the Loose" by Thin Lizzy
  
  "Night Shift" by Siouxsie and the Banshees
• Slipknot shared a performance-based video for the thumping metal anthem. Directed by Clown, it features footage from the band's Knotfest Roadshow 2021 tour.
• "The Chapeltown Rag" is the first single from The End, So Far. The album debuted at #1 on the UK albums chart, Slipknot's third UK chart-topper following 2001's Iowa and 2019's We Are Not Your Kind.
• The album title refers to Slipknot's parting from Roadrunner Records, their label since they released their eponymous 1999 debut. "It's such a different label than it was when we first signed with it," Corey Taylor told NME, erupting into a rage. "Once you're in the hands of people who don't care, it's just a f---ing business. And that's what happened."
  
  "We've had to fight for every f---ing release that we've had because the people who now work for Roadrunner think they know what they're doing and they just don't," he spat. "They've tried to give us f---ing advice, and we're just like, 'What are you talking about? What band do you think we are?'"