SLIPKNOT To Enter Studio Next Year?

SLIPKNOT DJ Sid Wilson has revealed to NME.com that the band is planning to enter the studio next year to begin recording the long-awaited follow-up to 2008's "All Hope is Gone". He said, "We've got [Rockstar Energy Drink] Mayhem Festival this summer and, after we break for winter and STONE SOUR [the band featuring SLIPKNOT members Corey Taylor and Jim Root] are done with their tour, we'll be back in the kitchen with SLIPKNOT. Actually, before STONE SOUR finish touring, we'll be in the studio preparing for Corey's return, keeping the irons hot."

He added, "It'll be tough, it won't be easy. SLIPKNOT's the biggest thing in all of our lives, but we're always going to come back to it. We're going to get it done. I'm excited and I'm ready to do it.

"I'm sick of hearing people talk, it's time for action. When we come together, it's badass; we need to harness that energy of the live shows. When we come together like we always do, it's going to be brutal."

Taylor has been ambivalent about working on new material following the death in May 2010 of the group's bassist, Paul Gray, although percussionist Shawn Crahan and drummer Joey Jordison have been much more confident about the band recording again.

When asked to clarify the difference in opinion between members of the band as to whether new material is being written or not, Crahan told Metal Injection at this year's South By Southwest conference, which took place in March in Austin, Texas, "I can clear it up easily for you. Everyone in the band is writing all the time, whether it's a micro-cassette recorder or a memo on your iPhone or Corey writing down random things he invents in his head on a piece of paper or Joey saying, 'I got nothing to do, I'm gonna go in the studio with all these ideas. I'm going to rent out a studio for a month and a half and I'm going to fucking write.'

"I think what people don't understand about what's being said is that we're all dealing with Paul's death differently. And some want to move, some want to take time. But basically, what's being said is, of course, things are being written. But nothing is done because we're not together yet. And there is no reason to get together and talk about it because there are other things moving, like the grieving process.

"What it all comes down to is that, yes, writing is being done seriously every day, but it is going to be a while. It's just going to be. There's things going on. It gets a little perverted in the press, almost like, 'he says yes, he says no, we got a problem.' It's just more like, yeah, writing is going on but it's going to be a while, and both of them are telling the truth, and I'm here to tell you, we're not going nowhere!"

SLIPKNOT last summer completed a three-week European tour that was the band's first run of dates since the death of Paul Gray. Taylor, who has been unsure of SLIPKNOT's future since Gray's death, told The Gauntlet last November that there are currently "no solid plans to do a SLIPKNOT album. Joey 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 '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 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 last year that SLIPKNOT can carry on "with or without" Taylor.