STONE SOUR's New Material Is 'Way More Rock 'N' Roll And Hard Rock' Than Heavy Metal, Says COREY TAYLOR

STONE SOUR frontman Corey Taylor has confirmed to Matt Pinfield in a new interview that the band has written and demoed eighteen songs for its sixth studio album, with plans to hit the studio in January for a likely mid-2017 release.

"I am so stoked," Corey said. "Oh, my god. We're gonna go in in January to record for a couple of months [and] hopefully get it out late spring, early summer of next year. And it'll be the first album that we're doing with [Johny] Chow, our bass player, and Christian Martucci, our new guitar player. And it is fantastic. I mean, we've already got eighteen songs written. And it is some of the best material we've ever written. It is so good, and it is such a great amalgam of all of these different styles that we just absolutely love. It's got a little bit of the heavy, like we like to do, but it's also way more hard rock — way more rock 'n' roll and hard rock than heavy. I mean, there's even a little bit of punk in there. And there's an energy there that is gonna decimate and blow away a lot of stuff that comes out next year. That's how excited I am."

The recording sessions for the next STONE SOUR album will take place at Sphere Studios in Los Angeles. "We're gonna record it the old-fashioned way," Taylor explained. "We're gonna get us all in the room. We're gonna record it together; we're gonna have that energy bouncing off of each other. It's gonna be a modern throwback, let's put it that way, and it's gonna destroy people."

He continued: "We're gonna co-produce ourselves with a good friends of ours named Jay Ruston, who has done a lot of work with a lot of different people. He has produced and mixed STEEL PANTHER, ANTHRAX [and] a bunch of different other people. He also mixed the two 'House Of Gold And Bones' albums that we put out, and he mixed the two covers EPs that STONE SOUR put out as well. So we have a great relationship with him, and he's somebody we really trust and we absolutely love to work with. So we're really looking forward to going in with him and really making a kick-ass rock 'n' roll album."

Corey added: "We're really excited, man. Just the demos alone are so good that it's just, like, 'Dude, this is gonna destroy!'"

STONE SOUR, has released two EPs of cover songs — "Meanwhile In Burbank…" and "Straight Out Of Burbank" — and was slated to issue a third, titled "No Sleep 'Till Burbank", but those plans now appear to have been scrapped.

STONE SOUR last year named Christian Martucci as the permanent replacement for Jim Root, who was dismissed from the band in late 2013 after he decided to sit out the group's last tour in order to begin working on the new SLIPKNOT album. Martucci was recruited to play on that tour and was confirmed as a permanent member in March 2015 in a Facebook post.

Root did not speak kindly of STONE SOUR in interviews after he was fired, saying, "Some of the guys in STONE SOUR, I think they just want to be a radio band and write strictly for radio and try to be more of a poppy rock band. And that's not really what I'm into. There's at least one guy in the band that's only concerned about money. I really have no desire to associate with people like that anymore."

Root played on all five STONE SOUR studio records to date, including 2010's "Audio Secrecy" and the band's last collection of original music, "House Of Gold And Bones", a double concept album which was released in two parts in 2012 and 2013.

Interview (audio):