SLIPKNOT Has 'Seven Or Eight' Full Songs Written For Next Album

SLIPKNOT has "seven or eight" full songs written for its next studio album, Shawn "The Clown" Crahan has revealed.

SLIPKNOT's touring cycle in support of 2014's ".5: The Gray Chapter", ended in November, with singer Corey Taylor returning to his other band STONE SOUR this year.

".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.

Asked in a brand new interview with Metal Hammer about the progress of the songwriting sessions for SLIPKNOT's next disc, Crahan said: "'The Gray Chapter' was pretty much the final learning velocity of our career. We had to replace a bass player, we had to replace a drummer — one of them was walking the earth, the other was buried in the earth. It was a very hard time. People were telling us, 'How is the band gonna write? Joey and Paul are gone.' Fuck you. We made a fucking awesome album that we love. And we're gonna continue to do that. I actually have a date that some of us are gonna get together in a studio and get things going for the next one."

According to the percussionist, he, guitarist Jim Root and drummer Jay Weinberg went to Los Angeles earlier in the year to "organize everything we had written out on the road. We wrote fifty fucking ideas," he said. "We spent two weeks organizing all that, and also adding some stuff that was written a year ago."

Shawn added: "We have over twenty-seven ideas ready to go — seven or eight of them are full songs. These songs can change, they can be written over, nothing is in stone. But it's great that we have concrete ideas to begin with. So the future has never been sweeter for SLIPKNOT music.

"I don't know what Corey's got in mind, because he will bring his own songs, too, but we're just writing music and getting ideas and moods and soundscapes — getting it all fucking together," he said.

In a recent interview with Metal Wani, Taylor spoke about a possible musical direction for SLIPKNOT's next album, saying that nothing has yet been decided. "I know I wanna write something violent, to be honest," he said. "I wanna do something that feels uncomfortable. I wanna go somewhere where we haven't been in a long, long time. I don't know what that means, but I think when I hear it, I'll know what it is."

".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.

SLIPKNOT recently premiered "Day Of The Gusano", a documentary about the band's first-ever visit to Mexico City, focusing on the importance of its fan base of "maggots" and featuring a catalog of live performances from the concert.