Slipknot are recording new material for consideration for their eighth studio album, and guitarist Jim Root says that the Iowa band have already stockpiled “at least 50” song ideas to work upon.
In a two hour plus interview conducted for the RIDE BYND podcast, Root revealed that the band are working with long-time Faith No More producer Matt Wallace, and are jamming ideas together in the studio, then refining the arrangements.
“We’ll jam for like an hour and a half, two hours,” he says, “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.”
“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,” Root continues. “And it’s exciting. And it’s like breathing a new life into wanting to create.
“There’s times where we just kind of sit back and we’re listening to what I just worked on and, I’m just like, Wow this is wild. This sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Yet there’s a familiarity to it that feels like I’ve been listening to it my whole life and it’s just so organic. It’s just Slipknot music.”
In terms of the direction that the new songs are taking, Root says, “I couldn’t tell you… I know I’m writing some of the fastest like grindpicking riffs, some of the most melodic, like heavy, like doomy kind of riffs. A lot of like really pretty, you know just beautiful like 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.”
Slipknot closed out their record deal with Roadrunner with 2022’s The End, So Far, and are now free agents. Earlier this year, on Record Store Day, the long-awaited Look Outside Your Window album recorded by Root, Corey Taylor, Shawn Crahan and Sid Wilson during studio sessions for 2008’s All Hope Is Gone album finally saw the light of day.
Watch the full RIDE BYND podcast interview with Root below.
