Slipknot guitarist Jim Root has started writing music for the nu metal nine-piece’s next studio album and hopes for it to have shared traits with their first two releases.
During a new appearance on the Turning Wrenches podcast, Root states that he has “six finished arrangements” ready for the follow-up to the Iowans’ 2022 album, The End, So Far.
However, the guitarist is in no rush to release the long-player, saying (via The PRP), “I think we need to be able to take our time to write and do pre-production and that’s gonna take awhile.”
To make up for the potentially long wait, Root would be keen for the band to put out something that bridges the gap between their last album and the next.
“I would really like to release something before we start working on a record,” he declares, later elaborating: “I would like to get something out sooner to kinda satisfy… I don’t know if it would show a direction or not, it depends on what arrangement it is.”
It’s unclear whether the stopgap release Root refers to is something that’s already been announced. Last year, shortly after the appointment of new drummer Eloy Casagrande (ex-Sepultura), Slipknot rented a billboard in Indio, California, with the words, “Long may you die.” This was confirmed shortly after to be the name of a new song, but it is yet to come out.
Percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan has also been teasing fans with details about a long-delayed offshoot project, Look Outside Your Window. The album, self-described as being more melodic and experimental than traditional Slipknot fare, was recorded simultaneously to 2008’s All Hope Is Gone and announced in 2018.
Crahan has offered several release windows for Look… in interviews over the years, all of which have come and gone without any new music, but he now claims that it’s been mixed and mastered and has artwork ready. Last year, in an interview with Metal Hammer, Root said he was so tired of waiting for that he has threatened to leak Look… multiple times.
Elsewhere in the Turning Wrenches discussion, Root says he’d like Slipknot’s next album to be recorded in a similar manner to their early work, especially their 1999 self-titled debut and its 2001 follow-up, Iowa.
“I want to make a raw album,” he says.
He later adds: “I would like to revisit the raw energy of how those first two records were recorded and even into the Vol. 3 record [from 2004]… There’s just something really stripped down and punk rock about it and I think we’ve been missing that on our past few records and I think it’s time to get back to that in some ways.”
Slipknot are gearing up for a European tour, which kicks off at Sweden Rock Festival on June 4. The band will spend the rest of the month playing festival dates in Europe, before returning to the US for Inkcarceration in Mansfield, Ohio, on July 19.
