SLIPKNOT's COREY TAYLOR: New Album's Success Means 'We're Doing Something Right Again'

In a brand new interview with Life+Times, SLIPKNOT frontman Corey Taylor was asked how it feels for the band to come back and sit on top of the charts with ".5: The Gray Chapter", six years after the release of "All Hope Is Gone".

"It's pretty rad, man," he said. "Obviously, there's a kind of a bittersweet vibe to it. But, I also think that not only would [late SLIPKNOT bassist] Paul [Gray] be proud of this album, but I think he'd be proud of the fact that we came back in a huge form and we were able to make a great album. So the fact the people are really embracing it — people are going out and they're buying it and they're really driving it back to a point where people wouldn't have said that metal is dead today. That just makes me happy because it means that we're doing something right again."

Taylor also spoke about the songwriting process for ".5: The Gray Chapter" and he recalled the moment when all the pieces started coming together.

"The first thing that I really responded to was actually the rough demo form of 'Sarcastrophe', the first heavy song on that album," he said. "And I can remember — 'cause that was something [guitarist] Jim Root had put together. He sent me the demo for [it], and I was just like, 'Wow, this is really, really good.' It was the first song I really wrote lyrics to. And I just laid down some dirty vocals and sent it back to him. He flipped out. After that, it was just an avalanche, because I had written about three songs for the project. We wrote about four or five tunes in the studio as well. So we were able to really kind of start using that catalyst for 'Sarcastrophe' as a way to kind of use that as the foundation to build the rest of this album."

SLIPKNOT has released a live video for the band's song "Custer", shot at last year's Knotfest in Devore, California. The band shared the clip on Facebook and included a link for their fans to purchase tickets for their 2015 tour. "Custer" is the latest single from ".5: The Gray Chapter", which came out in October.

Taylor told The Pulse Of Radio about the song and who it's aimed at. "'Custer''s kind of our dedication to everyone trying to tell us or make suggestions about how we should go about making new music, doing new things, how we should feel about Paul's death," he said. "There was a lot of people just kind of coming out of the woodwork that thought that they understood where we were coming from. So that's kind of our way of just being like, 'You don't get to get in. We will tell you exactly how we feel.'"

Taylor told Kerrang! magazine that "Custer" is "basically saying, 'You know what? Just when you think you've written our history, we're going to rewrite it again, and basically show you that we can take all the abuse that you put out there, and we're not going to lose a step, we're not going to lose an inch, we're not going to lose any ground — we're going to keep coming."

SLIPKNOT recently unveiled the details of a massive summer headlining tour dubbed "Summer's Last Stand". The trek kicks off on July 24 in West Palm Beach, Florida, wrapping up six weeks later on September 5 in Dallas.

Joining SLIPKNOT on the road trip will be LAMB OF GOD, BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE and MOTIONLESS IN WHITE.

The summer jaunt follows a brief spring run that SLIPKNOT will launch on April 25 at the Fort Rock festival in Fort Myers, Florida, ending on May 16 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.