Slipknot guitarist Jim Root has offered the most detailed look yet at the band’s next record, revealing they’ve teamed with producer Matt Wallace, amassed a mountain of new material, and settled on a loose, jam-driven approach that harks back to their earliest days.
Speaking with Ben Giese on the “Ride Bynd” podcast, Root also weighed in on the resurgence of nu metal — the late-’90s and early-2000s subgenre now enjoying a second life through TikTok and the Y2K revival — and made clear the new Slipknot music is heading somewhere else entirely.
“ That happens, man. That’s like fashion, that’s like movies. Everything has a cycle. Things come in and out of cycle… Which is wild, ’cause the new s**t we’re [Slipknot] writing does not sound like that at all. We’re not digressing or de-evolving into that sort of a… There’s elements of it. I mean, we write how we write, so we’re always gonna have a little bit of a vibe. But you’re not gonna hear — for lack of a better term — a nu metal record out of us, if that makes any sense,” Root said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
He pushed back on the nu metal label the band has worn since day one: “I don’t know that we’ve ever been nu metal. I think we just came out at a time when nu metal was happening, so that’s where we got lumped. ‘Cause when the New Wave Of American [Heavy] Metal happened, they lumped us into that, when I would do guitar interviews with magazines. And I’m, like, ‘Wait a minute. I thought we were nu metal.’ But now we’re doing interviews with Lamb of God and bands like that, and I’m just, like, ‘Okay, whatever.'”
For Root, the band resists any easy category. “To me, I think we’re just Slipknot. We’re just Slipknot music. I don’t think there is a box [you can put us in]. We have so many elements. ‘Cause everybody in the band comes from different musical backgrounds. There are those bands that go out and they kind of create their own thing, where you can hear, like, maybe an influence here and there. Like when you hear U2, there’s not really any other band that sounds like U2 unless they’re emulating U2‘s early career. But they evolved into something that, that’s their own thing. That’s what they do. I suppose you could probably put Muse in that category, although I do hear a lot of Queen influence in some of the stuff that [Muse‘s Matt] Bellamy‘s doing and the way he writes and approaches music. But there are bands that are uncategorizable, and I think — I don’t know if it’s whether I think or I hope; I don’t know what the right word is, I hope or I think, and/or both — that that is what Slipknot is. Even talking about with the producer we’re working with — we’re working with Matt Wallace right now to write this stuff — and 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 so organic. It’s just Slipknot music,” he explained.
Asked to describe the actual sound taking shape, Root pointed to the chemistry with new drummer Eloy Casagrande and a hands-on, in-the-room process. “It’s Slipknot, so we’re gonna have a sound, but at the same time, having Eloy [Casagrande] in the band… Man, it’s such an honor to be able to jam with that guy, and the way we’re approaching this… Yeah, I can sit at my computer, and I can throw some drum loops up and start writing riffs and layer it, and that’s great. And then I can give it to the band, and Corey [Taylor, Slipknot singer] can put lyrics on it and all that kind of stuff. And it has its place. But the way we’re approaching this, which is similar to the way it was being approached in the beginning as, like, garage-band sort of vibe. Now we’re going to a church, we’re setting up Eloy, I’m setting up 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, Clown [Slipknot percussionist Michael Shawn Crahan] will be in the room, and 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.’ In his mind, he’s thinking, ‘That’s a chorus. That’s an intro. That’s a verse line. That’s a bridge,’ whatever part it may be. But then he’ll look at us, and he’ll be, like, ‘Stick with that.’ Or he’ll be, like, ‘That was cool. Move on. Go somewhere else with that.’ And so what we’ve been able to do is do these jams, and then we’ll take a break. Clown will go in, and I’ll sit with Clown and Matt, our producer, and he’ll just start arranging the song out of it all, out of just off-the-top-of-our-head jams. And it’s so organic and so honest and it’s so open to interpretation,” Root said.
He described the raw range of riffs finding their way into the songs. “I couldn’t tell you what the direction of this next record is gonna be. I know I’m writing some of the fastest grind-picking riffs, some of the most melodic, heavy, doomy kind of riffs. A lot of really pretty, just beautiful, clean interludes and things like that that are finding their way into these songs. A lot of sort of just experimental — I don’t wanna say Pink Floyd, but maybe somewhere in that wheelhouse,” he continued.
Root went on to talk about Slipknot‘s current songwriting process describing it as “the most honest way that I can think to write music… When I’m sitting in front of a computer and I’m trying to write a song, it’s contrived. I know that’s what I’m there to do. When we do a jam, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. We could start a jam that happens so cool, we just get a song top to bottom without even thinking about it, because sometimes that does happen. We could jam for two hours and there might be two things in there that are cool that we could use for something else or any combination of all that stuff. But what it’s doing is, is it’s leaving a band of nine guys so free and so open that no matter what a riff is or what a part is… If Mick [Thomson, Slipknot guitarist] hasn’t taken part in one of the jams that we’ve done, he can come in, he can hear an arrangement, and he can be, like, ‘I know what I can do with this, and I’m not gonna do what you’re doing with this. I’m gonna do what I wanna do with this.’ And they can live together. It’s not just, like, ‘We’re gonna come up, we’re gonna meet up here, and we’re gonna play in unison, and then we’re gonna go into the slam part, and then it’s gonna come back out into the verse.’ It’s none of that kind of bulls**t. It’s just literally letting it evolve in a very organic, natural way, as it should. And that’s hard to do when you’re not a singer-songwriter. Singer-songwriters can do that all day long, ’cause everything they’re writing is coming out of themselves…”
On just how much material the band has stockpiled, Root revealed the process is far along — and modeled on how they built 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind. “We have so, so, so, so much material — probably at least 50, like, arrangements. I’m not saying they’re all full songs, and they all need work. We’re trying to leapfrog, go sort of back to the We Are Not Your Kind process where start working on something, getting it to a level, shelving it, working on something else, coming back to it, going, ‘Okay, now let’s take this to another level,’ and sort of doing that leapfrog where we can let everything evolve and hopefully at one point get to where it’s, like, ‘I don’t know if we can let these evolve.’ Sort of like making a movie. A lot of directors say they don’t finish making a movie; they just abandon the project,” he revealed.
The stockpile has grown fast. As recently as this past May, Root said he had six finished arrangements, having admitted his inspiration was “nearly zero” after a punishing touring stretch — a schedule he eventually asked management to halt so the band could focus entirely on writing. That number has since ballooned past 50.
More than two years ago, Slipknot teased a track called “Long May You Die“, recorded during some of the early sessions with Casagrande, though it has yet to see release. The band’s most recent album, The End, So Far, arrived in August 2022, and stands as their final full-length before the exits of keyboardist Craig Jones, who left in June 2023, and drummer Jay Weinberg, who was replaced by Casagrande. Last fall, Slipknot sold its music catalog to HarbourView Equity Partners — a deal covering the band’s publishing and recording masters royalties for its archival catalog, but not future releases.
