Psychosocial

Joey Jordison and Paul Gray built "Psychosocial" together, working on it as a team until it came together in a way Jordison compared to the writing of "Duality". He admitted he had mixed feelings about whether it was a good song at first. When the bassist and drummer played the track for vocalist Corey Taylor, he found the chorus already waiting on the lyric sheet he had been writing; he looked down at the bottom of the page and realized the words fit. He called it a song that was meant to be. Shawn Crahan described it as having a lot of social anxiety and said it was really fun and different from much of the band's other material. Crahan also had to ask Taylor what "Psychosocial" meant, and Taylor refused to tell him.

Slipknot released the song as the second single from their fourth studio album, All Hope Is Gone, which debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200. It entered airplay on June 26, 2008, and after a planned July 1 digital release was delayed, it arrived on July 7. The band played it live for the first time on July 9 at the White River Amphitheatre in Auburn, Washington.

The music video, directed by Paul Brown, was shot at Sound Farm studios in Jamaica, Iowa on June 30, 2008. Filming used cameras capable of 1,000 frames per second alongside traditional 35 mm hand crank equipment, an approach Crahan described as having the most extreme on both ends with nothing in the middle. The shoot had been delayed because turntablist Sid Wilson suffered an unrelated head injury beforehand and was hospitalized.