Slipknot are hard at work on album eight and Jim Root has shed light on how it's all going, plus confirming that Matt Wallace (Faith No More, Maroon 5) is producing.
Slipknot’s Jim Root has shared how the new Slipknot album is coming along, confirming that they’ve lined up Matt Wallace to produce.
The Nine are currently beavering away on their eighth album, the follow-up to 2022’s The End, So Far. It’s also significant in that it will be their first record with Eloy Casagrande on drums, who joined from Sepultura in 2024, and their first album since they completed their deal with longtime label Roadrunner.
Jim confirms that the band have nailed down at least 50 arrangements so far, though none of these are complete songs at present: “I’m not saying they’re all full songs and they all need work,” he tells the RIDE BYND podcast.
“…This new album we’re working on, that’s what we’re doing, we’re just jamming and Clown‘s [M. Shawn “Clown” Crahan, percussionist] arranging, and he’s taking things that Eloy [Casagrande, drummer] and I are playing, or me and Eloy and Pfaff [Michael “Tortilla Man” Pfaff, percussionist, vocalist, etc.] are playing, or he’s even sitting in on the jams,” Jim explains. “And we’ll jam for like an hour and a half, two hours, and we might get four song ideas out of that and then we just spend time arranging, and it’s so organic and it’s so real. It’s almost frightening.
“For the first time, I’m listening to some of these arrangements as they’re growing. And this is the closest I’ve heard to the music that I can hear in my head that I can’t get out that I’ve ever been. And it’s exciting. And it’s like breathing a new life into wanting to create.”
On Eloy’s influence on the record, he says: “There’s a new life with this stuff. And having Eloy helps, man. I mean, he’s such a talented human being and he lives, eats like the samurai, the master. He has that. He has that quality. He lives, eats, and breathes his drums. We’re playing shows. We just toured like two years straight. He’s got a practice pad off, you know, to the left behind his high hat. When we’re in-between songs and Corey‘s [Taylor, vocalist] talking, he literally turns to the side and he’s doing exercises. He’s just practicing, man. Keeping limber and he has very good discipline. He’s very knowledgeable. He’s very technical.
“But he also is very… he can lay back and get, you know, experimental. Like even like Phil Collins Genesis experimental, and his range of like influences is so infinite. I’ll throw a drummer’s name on like Stewart Copeland or something like that and he’ll like, ‘Oh oh’, and he’ll try to like hit that mode. And there’s so many drummers that he looks up to that I I’m not even aware of. So I’m learning shit from him, too. So it’s really good.”
Jim also sheds light on what we can expect their new album to sound like, suggesting it has a “garage band kind of vibe” and is “experimental”.
“I mean, you know, it’s Slipknot, so we’re going to have a sound. 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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