Icons of the metal world since their mid-’90s emergence, news of a new Slipknot album is enough to send most metalheads into a headbanging frenzy. With details on a sixth record beginning to trickle in, Corey Taylor and co.’s frantic fanbase are about to have a whole lot to get excited about.
Below, we round up everything we know about the impending return of the masked metal troupe. We’ll keep this page updated.
Latest updates:
- The band share a new song as well as the album’s title, release date, tracklist…and their new masks!
- In a new interview, Corey Taylor has described the next album as “evil” and “ridiculous”, adding that “it’s a pretty dark ride”
- The band have shared new single and video ‘All Out Life’
- Corey Taylor has described the new album as ‘one of the darkest chapters in Slipknot’s history’ and “a cross between the first album and Iowa”
- Drummer Jay Weinberg supports Taylor’s comments with grisly photo of his bloodied snare drum
- The band have been confirmed to perform on US TV on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Friday May 17. Will their air more new material on the outdoor stage?
Have we heard any new music yet?
Yes! Behold lead single ‘All Out Life‘, which was released last year. Speaking to Zane Lowe on Beats 1 at the time about the meaning of the song, frontman Corey Taylor said: “Everybody talks about toxic masculinity and toxic fandom these days, but for me it’s more about this toxic idea that unless something came out ten minutes ago then it’s not any good – and that bothers me.
“I love new music, but at the same time don’t turn your back on the music that’s been. It’s a rallying cry for everyone and saying ‘you know what? Let’s not talk about old, let’s not talk about new, let’s talk about what is. Let’s talk about what’s good and what’s real and get behind that’.
“Obviously I’ve been doing my thing, but [the band] just got together and started writing some of the most incredible music that I’ve ever heard. It was so good and so inspiring to me, that I just sat right down and wrote basically everything that I was feeling.
“It felt so good that when I first demoed it, we were like ‘do we need to re-track this?’ Then we decided that once we got the whole band on it, it was gonna have that live feel. That’s Slipknot.”
A new single, ‘Unsainted’, was released on May 16. The video showed off the bandmembers’ typically terrifying new masks for the first time.
Slipknot also performed the single and ‘All Out Live’ for the first time live during Jimmy Kimmel Live on May 17. Watch ‘Unsainted’ live below.
When’s it gonna be released?
August 9! Slipknot confirmed as much on March 4, while promising that further details about the record will emerge in the coming weeks. The announcement was paired with details of the ‘KNOTFEST Roadshow’, which will see the band tour across North America this summer.
Speaking to Resurrection Fest TV in October 2018, frontman Corey Taylor laid out the band’s plans for 2019 in detail. “Right now, the plan is for us to be in the studio early next year — like, first couple of months next year,” he said. “So, a couple of months to get that going, a couple of months to get production, new masks, new outfits, new everything. And hopefully be able to come and start touring in the summer when the album comes out.”
Taylor said that the band currently have demoed 20 songs that are “really, really good” and are currently working on which tracks will appear on the album.
“However, the way we’re talking right now, we’re trying to find ways that everyone can hear all the songs,” he explained. “So we’ll put the album out, and then maybe we’ll release something after that.
“It’s something that we’re really trying to think of — giving the audience more, giving the fans more of us. But it’s gotta make sense — it’s gotta be Slipknot. It can’t just be something that throw out there because we can; it’s gotta have art, it’s gotta have content, it’s gotta have passion to it.”
Taylor previously told Billboard in April 2018: “I know that we’re gonna try and put an album out next year – however, that is all speculation,” he said. “The best way to make God laugh is to announce your plans out loud. So I’m just going with the flow. The plan right now is next year but that is a huge plan because we still haven’t narrowed anything down, so we will definitely see what happens.”
In an interview with Australia’s HEAVY Podcast, Taylor added that he’d be using Slipknot as a stop-gap in 2019 from his other band, Stone Sour.
“[Stone Sour have] so much good material that we’ve got that we’re working on,” Taylor told Interviews. “We started writing new music pretty much as soon as we got on the road.
“We just can’t be stopped. We’re gluttons for punishment at this point. The cool thing is that knowing that we’ve got all this great material, we can kind of enjoy the rest as much as we can because we know when it’s time to really start ramping up the demo machine, we’re going to have all this cool stuff to listen to. There’s no pressure for us to just run right in.”
Taylor added: “Obviously, I’m going to do Slipknot next year, and it will allow the audience to miss [Stone Sour], which is the best thing in the world you can have.”
Have they teased anything?
Earlier this year, the band shared a spooky and distorted clip from the studio titled ‘vocals’. Let’s hope the album sounds a bit better than this, eh?
vocals | 8.9.19 pic.twitter.com/co81vHnc9l
— Slipknot (@slipknot) March 27, 2019
On September 1 2018, the band shared a clip of keyboardist Craig Jones alongside his nickname, ‘133’ – while some are suggesting that it might indicate 133 days until the release of new material, it seems more likely to be a reference to Jones’ stage name. Regardless, the clip has been snapped up by fans as a potential first teaser at the return of Slipknot – and likely the beginning of the reveals for their new era of masks.
133 pic.twitter.com/l1lY7EQlev
— Slipknot (@slipknot) September 1, 2018
Are they working on it already?
Slipknot entered some kind of studio back in April 2018, if this Twitter post of Shaun ‘The Clown’ Crahan and Taylor is to be believed – what’s more, it backs up those ‘next year’ rumours. Exciting stuff indeed. In a more recent Kerrang! Q&A session, though, Taylor said that nothing will be put to tape until the start of 2019. “I have fantastic news,” he said. “Some of you know, but I’ll just make it official right now: we are working on a new album. It’s only in the demo stages right now, however we have very serious, tentative plans to go into the studio at the beginning of next year and get this fucking going.”
Speaking to NME in 2017, Crahan also let loose a little more info on their writing process. “Every three or four months we’ve been getting together and we’ve been writing for up to 30 days,” he said back in August 2017. “Currently, we have about 27 pieces of work – about seven or eight are completed. They’re not completed songs, that’s far from the truth. That’s where people start fighting over Corey Taylor not being there or Jim wanting to do something else. We as artists have demanded that we get together every three or four months and blow our brains out with art. We’ve been trying to create as much art as possible.”
In February 2018, the band were back in the studio to do some more work on the record, as evidenced in an Instagram post posted by Taylor. The frontman shared a snap of himself with headphones around his neck in what looked to be a recording booth. It was captioned, “Back to work…”
Is there a title?
Yes, it’s called ‘We Are Not Your Kind’.
Speaking to Iowa radio station, Lazer 103.3, Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan previously hinted that band have worked on new material since 2016.
When asked if the band had already completed any new songs in preparation for the next studio album, Crahan said: “I’ll let the world know this: I get reprimanded a lot for my mouth just for how much I want to deliver because I really don’t care, but I’ll tell you this: A, we’ve been home for two years. B, do your research and figure out how long we really stay home and C, staying home gets boring, so you’ve got to do things.”
He continued: “I would imagine that there’s material that’s not only out there, but it’s finished. We did things a little bit different this time off. We made sure we made ourselves happy and making ourselves happy is we live for the song, we live for the stage, we live for the fans, we live for the art, but if it’s going to be a time we can create art, record songs, write songs, jam songs, we do it. So, we’ve learned we’re obsessed with that process…”
“We love chasing vision and art until it’s complete. It takes time. We did ourselves a solid this time around and made sure the whole time off we could create and that’s what we did. It’s been awesome, and I think everybody is going to understand just how wonderful it has been the last two years to take the time off and create.”
Is there a tracklist and artwork?
Here you go!
1. Insert Coin
2. Unsainted
3. Birth Of The Cruel
4. Death Because Of Death
5. Nero Forte
6. Critical Darling
7. Liar’s Funeral
8. Red Flag
9. What’s Next
10. Spiders
11. Orphan
12. My Pain
13. Not Long For This World
14. Solway Firth
What will it sound like?
Heavy as fuck, apparently. Speaking to Zane Lowe on Beats 1 in October 2018, Taylor said: “The album is underway, and it’s going to be one of the darkest chapters in Slipknot’s history,” said Taylor. “It’s that good. It’s complicated, it’s dark, it’s heavy, it’s heavy, it’s melodic, it’s fierce, it’s angry and it’s raw as hell. It’s going to be talking about a lot of things that people are going to need in their life.”
As for the energy of the record, Taylor said: “It kind of had a cross between the first album and ‘Iowa’. I keep telling people that this is what the kids from Iowa would have made if they’d matured. It’s a step from that.”
Speaking in that Kerrang! Q&A session, Taylor compared it to arguable career highlight ‘Iowa’. “We have 16 songs written right now and they are fucking dangerous,” he said. “I loved ‘.5’, but this album, to me, makes ‘.5’ look like nobody’s business. This is ‘Iowa’ levels of heavy. And I have to go out and tour this shit at my age – I can feel those songs in my back!”
That ‘Iowa’ connection might have legs, too – fans on Reddit have spotted guitarist ‘V-Man’ in a recording studio with producer Ross Robinson’s dog. Robinson was responsible for the recording of both ‘Iowa’ and Slipknot’s self-titled record.
In an October 2018 interview with Metal Hammer, Corey Taylor has stated that the band have just finished writing ‘our heaviest song’.
“At a time when most bands are slowing down, I think we’ve written our heaviest song – one of them anyway – on this new album,” says Taylor. “It’s going to be fucking crazy. People are going to shit their pants when they hear it.
“Some of this shit is just so hard and dirty fast,” he continues. “It’s fucking really good. It’s also us at our most ambitious, our most experimental, also us doing what we fucking do best which is basically when everybody thinks they’ve got us figured out, we just smack them in the face with everything we’ve got.”
He also stressed that it’ll take a more mature direction too.
“What if the guys who made Iowa matured? What if the kids who made Iowa grew up?”, Taylor said, while also explaining that “some of this shit is just so hard and dirty fast.”
It’ll be emotionally heavy, too, with Taylor also adding that his lyrics on the band’s new songs are “some of the best [he’s] ever written.” “It’s been a heavy couple of years for me personally,” he said. “So I’m working out some things, personally for myself, which has been great. I’ve been able to grab ahold of some of the depression that I’ve been fighting and formulate the way that I want to describe it. It’s probably the most I’ve shared in years.”
An interview with Shawn “Clown” Crahan in Billboard has revealed more about the album’s themes which he described as all about “good vs. evil, or in this sense, evil vs. good.”
He added: “It’s about being a human being and experiencing what you have in correlating it to this world…This world is ugly and it’s supposed to be, and it has to be in order for art to lead to grandness and beauty.”
Crahan also revealed that the band are returning to work with producer Greg Fidelman. Asked about the release date, however, Crahan would give nothing away, saying: “Nothing is in stone…There are songs that are considered the album, but everything can change. We would never go do [gigs] without an album, but…we’re not following any rules this time, not that we ever did. We’re on an outline, and I think everybody’s going to be pleasantly surprised.”
In January 2019, drummer Jay Weinberg updated fans about the progress of the metallers’ forthcoming record with a photo of his bloodied snare drum.
In the caption he wrote: “In case you’re wondering what kind of album we’re making.”
In a March 2019 interview with The Des Moines Register, Corey Taylor said that the new album will be both “evil” and “ridiculous.” He also added that ‘All Out Life’ isn’t “nearly as dark and vicious as the rest of the suff that we’re working on.” He also opened up about his personal life, saying that depression and divorce had impacted the latest.
He said: “All I was doing was giving and I found myself absolutely, completely tapped…You could see it in my skin. You could see it in my eyes. That’s basically the journey I’m going to take people on this album… show them what happens to depression when you have no chemicals to fall back on. It’s a pretty dark ride.”
How’s the mood in Camp ‘Knot?
Predictably, revved up. “I will give you this – we have decided to do things differently,” Clown told NME about their next album. “Our label had been bought and sold, people who used to give me advice are gone now, we’re still standing. We’re not going to wait around for Corey Taylor to say that he’s ready, no one’s going to wait for me to finish directing a movie, the same thing goes if someone wants to go out on tour with someone else.”
However, there’s been some speculation that this could be the last Slipknot record, too. “We got some stuff, man,” said Crahan when speaking to The Jasta Show podcast. “I feel like this could be it for me. We’re all getting older. I never like telling anyone like, ‘Hey this is it!’ Because I don’t have to, fuck everyone.
“But like I’ve said, I’ve been reflecting and there’s a lot of hard things that I could say about friends, brothers… We’re good, but it’s a big world. I’ve done enough work, I’ve produced and done remixes and art and performed, I’ve done enough where while I was in it none of it was registered.” Clown added: “This could be it for me. I’ve done enough work.”
He backed up the statements in an NME interview too: “I’m not gonna be like, ‘Farewell tour!’ then come back. Never say those words to fans – you have to come back if you say that. For me it’s like, I’m going to go fishing indefinitely.”
After being announced as headliners for this year’s Download Festival, Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan told Kerrang: “If someone chooses to come and see us, they’re going to get us. I don’t care about the day before, and I don’t care about the day after!
“One thing I know about Slipknot is that it’s impossible to not talk about us, so I really don’t get caught up in competition – I’m here to kick you in the face and make you remember it. End of story. I don’t know what Tool is doing, and I don’t fucking care. I wanna hear their new album, but if I’m out playing, I don’t care what they’re doing, and they don’t care what I’m doing. But I’m gonna kick you in the face.”