Slipknot guitarist Jim Root revealed in a recent interview that the band is working with producer Matt Wallace on a new album.
Wallace’s production and mixing credits include Faith No More’s The Real Thing and Angel Dust, The Replacements’ Don’t Tell a Soul, and Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane.
The reveal came during a freewheeling two-hour conversation with Ben Glese on the Ride Bynd motorcycle-focused podcast, with Root discussing work on the new Slipknot album at length.
The guitarist said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), “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.”
Elsewhere, Root praised new Slipknot drummer Eloy Casagrande, saying, “It’s Slipknot, so we’re gonna have a sound, but at the same time, having Eloy 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] can put lyrics on it and all that kind of stuff. And it has its place.”
He went on to say, “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 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.'”
Root later described the volume of material Slipknot had put together using that method of jamming and grabbing parts via recording to arrange into finished pieces later. He said, “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.”
Slipknot recently celebrated the anniversary of their 1999 self-titled album with a deluxe edition featuring over 40 unreleased songs, as well as a tour focused on that early era. In April of this year, members of Slipknot released Look Outside Your Window, a long-rumored album stemming from 2008’s recording sessions for All Hope Is Lost.
Watch Jim Root on the Ride Bynd podcast below.
