The drummer talked through Neurosis, Converge and a handful of artists well outside metal, in a conversation about the two years since his dismissal.
Jay Weinberg was asked which artists have been reaching him lately, and the answer came from someone who has spent two years needing music to do a specific job.
The drummer appeared on the YouTube channel of “HeartSupport“, a nonprofit providing free music-based mental health support, in conversation with the organisation’s development manager Bryce Maopolski. The interview covered therapy, burnout, becoming a father for the first time and the path his career has taken since Slipknot dismissed him in November 2023.
“There are all sorts of artists that I really like that speak to the dynamics of being a person that i could listen to on any one day to get through, to use music to overcome things like we all do,” he said (via Loudwire).
Neurosis
Two bands came to him first, both of which he has been returning to since he was a teenager.
Neurosis resurfaced in March with An Undying Love For A Burning World, their twelfth album and first in a decade, put out through their own Neurot Recordings with no announcement beforehand. It is the band’s first with Aaron Turner of Isis on vocals and guitar, replacing founding member Scott Kelly, who has not been part of the group since 2019, and the first Neurosis record since 1996’s Through Silver In Blood that Steve Albini, who died in 2024, had no hand in recording.
Weinberg rates it above everything else they have made.
“That is the album of their lives and really feels like that: their best work to date,” he said. “To address the incredibly complex nature of what it means to be a person in this age and not in some kind of contrived way but in a very real, primal, cuts-to-the-core-of-you kind of way.”
Converge
Converge have had an unusually productive year, putting out two full albums inside four months. Love Is Not Enough arrived on February 13 through Epitaph and Deathwish, running 31 minutes, the shortest record they have made. Hum Of Hurt followed on June 5. Kurt Ballou recorded and mixed both at God City.
Weinberg said they do the same work for him that the Neurosis album does.
“It’s kind of ceremonious that we’re all using this music to stare darkness and confusion and anxiety and stress in the face and not run away from it, but to feel embraced in taking that on for ourselves… That’s immensely powerful.”
The rest of the list
From there the names stopped being metal altogether. Weinberg cited Sean Solomon and his album The World Is Not Good Enough, the Canadian songwriter Andy Shauf, bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings, and Australia’s King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, whom he called “freakishly prolific.”
What links them, for him, is a physical response rather than a genre.
“Between all these artists, there’s stuff that i know when i feel it, when i get transported and i can feel that this person’s creative output or this collective’s creative output makes me feel lighter in some way. It makes me feel like those emotions that I feel are understood by these people as well,” he eplained.
The listening habits sit against a specific stretch of time. Slipknot announced on November 5, 2023 that they had decided to part ways with Weinberg, ending a run that began in 2013. Two weeks later he had an outpatient procedure to repair a torn labrum in his left hip and correct a misshapen section of his femur, which left him recovering from surgery while working out what had happened to his career.
“There was a certain point that I kind of found myself as like a tangled ball of rusted barbed wire, is what it really kind of felt like emotionally,” he said of that period.
He described the two things landing together as the hardest part.
“When you find yourself in a transitional phase, especially in my life, especially having a significant transitional phase occur at the same time as I had to have a physical surgery to correct some issues., and I had hip surgery and was on my couch with my thoughts alone, to endure all of that concurrently was… I mean, talk about a mental and physical grind every moment of every day just to feel like a normal person. The experience definitely taught me a lot, and continues to. None of this is, like, ‘I’m fixed and I’m all better.’ I just view it as this is part of being a healthy person, of tending to not just the physical rigors of what it is that I enjoy putting myself through.”
Weinberg began seeing a therapist in Tennessee around the turn of 2024 and now speaks to one weekly.
Weinberg joined Slipknot in 2013 as Joey Jordison‘s replacement and played his last show with them on November 3, 2023 at Hell & Heaven in Toluca, Mexico. Eloy Casagrande took the seat in February 2024. Before Slipknot he played with Against Me!, Madball and Bruce Springsteen, his father Max Weinberg‘s longtime employer.
He has since taken the drum stool in Suicidal Tendencies, and has spoken publicly about legal restrictions that limited who he could work with after leaving. They parted ways earlier in January. He became a father for the first time earlier this year.
