Slipknot‘s Corey Taylor has claimed that the band’s upcoming sixth album will see them pushing the boundaries of their own creativity like never before.
The metal giants will return with ‘We Are Not Your Kind‘ in August, their first original record since 2014’s ‘The Grey Chapter‘.
Speaking to BBC Radio 1’s Daniel P Carter, Taylor said the record is the band at their heaviest – and it saw them pushing the boundaries to get there.
“As a whole — and I can say this honestly — it is probably the furthest we’ve pushed the boundaries of creativity and experimentation, while also not losing our identity,” Taylor said.
“There are bands out there who, they go for all of that experimentation and they forget who they are — they forget that there’s an audience that wants to hear a certain type… It doesn’t have to be the exact thing, but there has to be a certain emotion that they are looking for, that they wanna hear… There has to be that touchstone. You can go as far out as you want, but you have to be able to pull them back to that feeling that made them fans in the first place. And I really think we did that with this album. We not only went places that we’ve hinted at, musically, over the years, but never really went full-bore, but we’re also doing heavier things than we’ve ever done.”
He added: “We’re still a band that has always just written music for us. If we’re not impressed by it, we’re not putting crap out, you know? Even stuff in retrospect where we may take a listen to it later and go, ‘Ah, I don’t know if that was us.’ But at the time, we’re absolutely backing it, no matter what. So as long as we continue to write music for us first and the audience second, that’s how you keep that excitement.”
And after debuting their latest look at their recent live shows, Taylor says the band are satisfied with their recent performances.
“It’s been really good,” he said.
“The set’s been pounding. The show looks amazing. We’re all playing really well. We’re getting bigger pops from things like [last year’s standalone single] ‘All Out Life’ than we do from stuff like ‘Duality’, which is nuts… Honestly, it’s everything that we’ve wanted to do for years, and we just never had the budget and we had also had a lot of people around us telling us we couldn’t do it…
“We want people all over the world to see the same show. If there’s an A and B rig, they’re identical. We don’t wanna come in with some tired, half-assed bullshit. It’s not who we are, and we’ve had to contend with that almost our entire career. So not only is it interactive — there’s video, there’s fire — but the whole set looks like an industrial complex. This is our attempt to create some Iron Maiden stuff, which is something we’ve been trying to do for a while.”
The band’s guitarist Jim Root recently downplayed talk that the record sounded like their seminal second album ‘Iowa’.
This comes after Slipknot returned to the UK to headline Download Festival earlier this month. In a five star review, NME hailed it as “an undeniable, unmissable highlight of the weekend”.