COREY TAYLOR: Some Of My SLIPKNOT Bandmates 'Are Painting Me As The Villain'

SLIPKNOT recently completed a three-week European tour that was the band's first run of dates since the death of bassist Paul Gray in May 2010. Singer Corey Taylor, who has been unsure of SLIPKNOT's future since Gray's death, told The Gauntlet earlier this week that there are currently "no solid plans to do a SLIPKNOT album. Joey [Jordison, drums] and Paul were really the ones who would get things started. Then I would take what they wrote and really try to put it in a song sense and then that would get us all going. Especially on [the latest SLIPKNOT album, 2008's] 'All Hope Is Gone', they gave me a lot of great material to work with. It was up to me to shorten it and make the songs into songs, basically."

He continued, "There is a huge pull in this band right now. It doesn't mean we can't go out on the road and share the music we have with the audience. But rushing in and making another album does not compute to me right now. It will be a few years before it does.

"There are some guys in the band that are painting me as the villain, but at the same time I have some guys in the band that support me and feel the same way.

"There are a lot of things in the band that have to change before we can go in and make an album. There are a lot of things we have to figure out and make peace with. We already know what the album is going to be about; we just need to find the strength to do it the right way."

Taylor told Billboard.com last week that when SLIPKNOT does eventually make it back into the recording studio, "We know that everything we do on that album is going to be about Paul. It's going to be very melancholy. It's going to be a more saddened form of rage when it does happen, and it'll be a whole path that we've never gone down before." He added that he personally was "not as anxious to make a new album as maybe certain people in the band are, and I know a lot of the guys in the band feel the same way I do, whether they want to admit it or not. It just makes more sense to try and figure things out before we try to get into a studio... I don't want to risk losing what we've built because somebody's trying to prove a point."

Jordison said earlier this year that SLIPKNOT can carry on "with or without" Taylor.

Taylor, for his part, has been touring with his other band STONE SOUR and has indicated that he would like to return to the studio with that group next.

Jordison told The Pulse Of Radio not long ago that he thinks the band's next album could be its most intense. "We're a family, and losing a family member sucks," he said. "But you can't help that, but you need to move on and I think that what we're gonna do might be the most powerful thing that we've ever created."

SLIPKNOT concluded its three-week European tour on July 10 with a headlining set at England's Sonisphere festival.

Taylor and Crahan recently confirmed that SLIPKNOT will tour the U.S. sometime next year.

Quality HD video footage of SLIPKNOT's June 30, 2011 concert at Ledovyi Dvoretz in St. Petersburg, Russia can be seen below.