About a million things have happened since Slipknot last released music, in the form of their 2022 album The End, So Far and 2023’s stand alone single, Bone Church. It’s their first new song with drummer Eloy Casagrande in their ranks, as well as their first since the departures of Craig Jones in 2023 and Sid Wilson last month. It’s also their first song under the label imprint (sic)est Records (nice name, guys), which Roadrunner and Atlantic appear to be involved in.
Slipknot have made no secret that they’ve been hard at work on album eight, with guitarist Jim Root suggesting back in July that their new music has a “garage band kind of vibe” and is “experimental”. They’ve also confirmed that they lined up Matt Wallace to produce.
“I mean, you know, it’s Slipknot, so we’re going to have a sound,” he told the RIDE BYND podcast. “But at the same time, having Eloy in the band is like such an honor to be able to jam with that guy. And the way we’re approaching this. Like, yeah, I can sit at my computer and I can throw some drum loops up and start writing riffs and layer it, you know, and that’s great. And then I can give it to the band and Corey can put lyrics on it and all that kind of stuff. And you know, it has its place.
“But the way we’re approaching this, which is similar to the way it was being approached in the beginning, is like a garage band sort of vibe. Like now we’re going to a church, we’re setting up Eloy, I’m setting up, you know, a guitar rig, and we’re just jamming for like two hours. And then out of those two hours, we’ll go back, and as we’re playing, like Clown will be in the room, he’s got headphones on, and he might start jamming with us, or he might just be listening to what we’re doing. And he’ll throw his arm up, or he’ll hit the light, and that’s a cue to our producer like, that’s a part, you know what I mean?
“I couldn’t tell you what the direction of this next record is going to be. I know I’m writing some of the fastest grindpicking riffs, some of the most melodic, heavy, doomy kind of riffs. A lot of lreally pretty clean interludes and things like that that are finding their way into these songs. A lot of just experimental — I don’t want to say Pink Floyd — but maybe somewhere in that in that wheelhouse.”
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