Slipknot percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan has teased the nu metal nine-piece will release a torrent of new music in the near-future.
During a recent interview with Knotfest, the Iowans’ co-founder says that their next album is in the works and that progress continues on their long-anticipated offshoot project Look Outside Your Window.
For starters, he declares when looking ahead to 2025, “We got a new album.”
“2025 I'm going to work on ‘No Complaining’,” Clown says in full. “Just not going to do it anymore. I realised my expectations are never going to be met. So I need to give myself a break. It’s probably the last part of ego I need to work on. That way I can just float. Nothing will bother me. I can just work on positive potential.”
He continues: “We got a new album. We’re gonna start at some point. I just want to roll into that with an energy like it’s all starting again. That’s how I want to approach it.”
Clown also suggests that the band’s recent 25th-anniversary tour has galvanised them into writing new music. He says there have been mentions of writing in Slipknot’s rehearsal room, as they did during their formative days.
“If we got our room and our shit’s going, someone’s gonna pop, everybody's gonna join in,” he says. “And if we go, ‘Oh, that's good,’ that fucker will be done by the end of the night and then massaged over a month. And that'’ the best way to write fucking Slipknot music.”
New Slipknot music has been teased for some time now. A single called Long May You Die was announced back in the spring but, at time of publishing, is yet to see the light of day.
Elsewhere in the interview, Clown offers yet another update on the long-rumoured, long-delayed Look Outside Your Window, which has apparently been confirmed for an early 2025 release date.
Slipknot members Clown, Corey Taylor (vocals), Sid Wilson (turntables) and Jim Root (guitars) recorded Look Outside Your Window during downtime in the sessions for 2008 album All Hope Is Gone. In the latest twist regarding the much-talked-about, little-listened-to effort, Clown insists that it isn’t a Slipknot album at all.
“It was never a Slipknot album,” he claims. “Not while it was happening, not while I've held onto it for ten years, and certainly not fuckin’ when it comes out.”
Although Look Outside Your Window now stands as one of nu metal’s biggest white whales, snippets of it have been heard. The track ’Til We Die made the deluxe edition of All Hope Is Gone. Plus, the song My Pain from 2019 album We Are Not Your Kind evolved out of material recorded for the project.
The long wait for Look Outside Your Window, the existence of which was revealed back in 2018, has caused fatigue among both the Slipknot fanbase and the band themselves. Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer in December, Root said that he’s repeatedly threatened to leak the project and get it over and done with.
“Man, I keep telling Clown that I’m just gonna throw it up on Youtube, then put a link to it on my Instagram or something,” the guitarist stated. “He’s like, ‘Don’t dude, just don’t.’”
