COREY TAYLOR On Lyrics For Upcoming SLIPKNOT Album: 'It Deals With A Lot Of My Personal Life'

SLIPKNOT frontman Corey Taylor recently spoke to Music Week about the lyrical inspiration for the band's upcoming album.

"I can't go into it too much because it deals with a lot of my personal life, but the last few years have been really tough for me," he said. "With the exception of my kids and my bands, it's been a dark time for me. I didn't relapse or anything, but it was just the depression that I was dealing with and the anger that I was dealing with that was consuming me. I had to get myself out of that situation, and now the lyrics I'm writing for the SLIPKNOT album are all about that period of time, basically the last five years of my life just trying to get my head around everything, and moving towards the happiness I remember.”

Asked if there any governing principles he has when it comes to writing lyrics, or set ways of doing it, Corey said: "My mind is so fucking all over the place, it's not even funny half the time. For me, the quest has always been the perfect lyric, that perfect turn of phrase, that perfect set of stanzas to sit there and read over and over and be so delighted and tickled that you wrote them and so proud. You know, I've come close a handful of times, but I don't think I've written the perfect thing yet, but that's why I keep going for it, I keep chasing that. That's one of the reasons why I also try to write in so many different genres. I never pigeonhole myself into just rock and metal. I've branched out, I've done stuff here and there with other bands and genres, to put my ego in the backseat and sing other people's lyrics and try to find meaning for myself in those lyrics."

This past October, SLIPKNOT released a new song called "All Out Life". The track will appear on SLIPKNOT's upcoming follow-up to 2014's ".5: The Gray Chapter" album, due later this year via Roadrunner. The band is once again collaborating with producer Greg Fidelman who engineered and mixed SLIPKNOT's 2004 album "Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)" and helmed ".5: The Gray Chapter".

SLIPKNOT singer Corey Taylor told "Zane Lowe's World Record" about the lyrical inspiration for "All Out Life": "Everybody talks about toxic masculinity and toxic fandom these days. For me, it's more about this toxic idea that unless something came out 10 minutes ago, it's not any good, and that bothers me. It's, like, I love new music, but at the same time, don't turn your back on the music that's been. Don't turn your back on the people that worked to make a platform for you to have a platform in the first place, so for me, it's really about ... It's a rallying cry for everyone. It's about all of us getting together and saying, 'You know what? Let's not talk about old. Let's not talk about new. Let's talk about what is. Let's talk about what's good, what's real, and get behind that and start embracing things that matter because there's history there and not just because it's the next best thing.'"

Taylor went on to call the new album "one of the darkest chapters in SLIPKNOT's history — it's that good. It's complicated, it's dark, it's heavy, it's melodic, it's fierce, it's angry and it's real, it's raw as hell and it's gonna be talking about a lot of things that people are going to need in their life right now."

SLIPKNOT's video for "All Out Life" was directed by the band's own M. Shawn Crahan.

".5: The Gray Chapter" was released following a six-year hiatus during which founding SLIPKNOT bassist Paul Gray died and drummer Joey Jordison was dismissed.

".5: The Gray Chapter" sold around 132,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 1 on The Billboard 200 chart. The CD arrived in stores in October 2014 via Roadrunner.

Gray died in 2010 from a drug overdose, while Jordison was let go in December 2013, just before SLIPKNOT began recording the last album.