“Six finished arrangements”: Slipknot are putting together a new record after all

It sounds like a new Slipknot album actually is taking shape. Guitarist Jim Root has said that he has “six finished arrangements” for a putative album, which would be the follow up to 2022’s The End, So Far

Talking on the Turning Wrenches podcast, Root said: “I want to make a raw album. 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.”

Root suggested that he had “six finished arrangements,” though that didn’t mean the album will be released anytime soon. “I think we need to be able to take our time to write and do pre-production and that’s gonna take awhile.”

Slipknot - The Dying Song (Time To Sing) - YouTube

Watch On

This is just a couple of weeks after Root suggested to another outlet that inspiration was running dry. Asked by Guitar Interactive if they’d been working on new material, he said: “Not diligently."

"Honestly, we’ve been touring so much since (drummer) Eloy (Casagrande) joined the band that my inspiration is nearly zero. And there’s a bunch of music that was written during COVID that I’m not interested in. I think everybody else in the band gets it too, and I think they’re kind of, like, ‘Okay, we need to maybe sweep all that shit under a rug and start fresh.’”

“And I wanna get touring behind us,” he continued. “I wanna have at least a month off just to shut my brain off and sleep and all that kind of stuff. And then when I find myself going out to my little home studio and putting riffs together, then I’ll know it’s time to start.”

Either way, looks like a new album is some way off. Whether it will be released before or after Look Outside Your Window remains to be seen. This is ‘lost’ album that was recorded around 2008 but has been left in the vaults all these years, largely because it is - reputedly - in a very different style to what fans might expect. In an interview with Knotfest earlier this year, Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan said that it was “not even close” to sounding like Slipknot.

Prior to this, late last year he had said that it would be coming out imminently, vowing to NME: “You have my word, it’s out of my hands now. It’s being moved on, the money has been spent and there is a plan. The management has it and it is coming out.”