Slipknot guitarist Jim Root has opened up about the band’s new music, its uncategorizable direction, and the organic recording process currently underway with producer Matt Wallace, in a new interview with Ben Giese of the Ride Bynd podcast. The conversation touched on the resurgence of nu metal — the genre Slipknot was famously lumped into at the start of their career — and what separates the band’s forthcoming material from anything they’ve done before.
On the nu metal revival, Root said (transcribed by Blabbermouth): “That happens, man. That’s like fashion, that’s like movies. Everything has a cycle. Things come in and out of cycle… Which is wild, ‘cause the new sh*t we’re writing does not sound like that at all. We’re not digressing or de-evolving into that sort of a… There’s elements of it. I mean, we write how we write, so we’re always gonna have a little bit of a vibe. But you’re not gonna hear — for lack of a better term — a nu metal record out of us, if that makes any sense.”
“I don’t know that we’ve ever been nu metal,” Root continued. “I think we just came out at a time when nu metal was happening, so that’s where we got lumped. ‘Cause when the New Wave Of American Heavy Metal happened, they lumped us into that, when I would do guitar interviews with magazines. And I’m, like, ‘Wait a minute. I thought we were nu metal.’ But now we’re doing interviews with Lamb of God and bands like that, and I’m just, like, ‘Okay, whatever.’”
Root added: “To me, I think we’re just Slipknot. We’re just Slipknot music. I don’t think there is a box [you can put us in]. We have so many elements. ‘Cause everybody in the band comes from different musical backgrounds. There are those bands that go out and they kind of create their own thing, where you can hear, like, maybe an influence here and there. Like when you hear U2, there’s not really any other band that sounds like U2 unless they’re emulating U2’s early career. But they evolved into something that, that’s their own thing.
“I hope — and I think — that that is what Slipknot is. Even talking about it with the producer we’re working with — we’re working with Matt Wallace right now to write this stuff — and there’s times where we just kind of sit back and we’re listening to what I just worked on and I’m just, like, ‘Wow, this is wild. This sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before, yet there’s a familiarity to it that feels like I’ve been listening to it my whole life.’ And it’s so organic. It’s just Slipknot music.”
Asked to describe the new Slipknot material, Root said: “It’s Slipknot, so we’re gonna have a sound, but at the same time, having [new Slipknot drummer] Eloy [Casagrande] in the band… Man, it’s such an honor to be able to jam with that guy, and the way we’re approaching this… The way we’re approaching this is similar to how it was being approached in the beginning — like a garage-band vibe. Now we’re going to a church, we’re setting up Eloy, I’m setting up a guitar rig, and we’re just jamming for, like, two hours.
“And then out of those two hours, Clown [percussionist Michael Shawn Crahan] will be in the room with headphones on, and he might start jamming with us, or he might just be listening. And he’ll throw his arm up, or he’ll hit the light — that’s a cue to our producer, like, ‘That’s a part.’ In his mind, he’s thinking, ‘That’s a chorus. That’s an intro. That’s a verse line. That’s a bridge.’ But then he’ll look at us and he’ll be, like, ‘Stick with that,’ or ‘That was cool. Move on.’ And so what we’ve been able to do is take these jams, then Clown will sit with me and Matt and just start arranging the song out of it all. And it’s so organic and so honest and so open to interpretation.”
Root said of the new music’s direction: “I couldn’t tell you what the direction of this next record is gonna be. I know I’m writing some of the fastest grind-picking riffs, some of the most melodic, heavy, doomy kind of riffs. A lot of really pretty, just beautiful, clean interludes and things like that that are finding their way into these songs. A lot of sort of just experimental — I don’t wanna say Pink Floyd, but maybe somewhere in that wheelhouse.”
Root elaborated on why the current writing method is the most honest Slipknot has ever worked: “When I’m sitting in front of a computer and I’m trying to write a song, it’s contrived. I know that’s what I’m there to do. When we do a jam, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. We could start a jam that goes so cool, we just get a song top to bottom without even thinking about it.
“What it’s doing is, it’s leaving a band of nine guys so free and so open that no matter what a riff is or what a part is… If Mick [Thomson, Slipknot guitarist] hasn’t taken part in one of the jams that we’ve done, he can come in, hear an arrangement, and be, like, ‘I know what I can do with this, and I’m not gonna do what you’re doing — I’m gonna do what I wanna do.’ And they can live together.
“It’s just literally letting it evolve in a very organic, natural way, as it should. And that’s hard to do when you’re not a singer-songwriter. Singer-songwriters can do that all day long, ‘cause everything they’re writing is coming out of themselves.”
On where the band currently stands in the process, Root said: “We have so, so, so, so much material — probably at least 50, like, arrangements. I’m not saying they’re all full songs, and they all need work. We’re trying to leapfrog — go sort of back to the We Are Not Your Kind process where [you] start working on something, getting it to a level, shelving it, working on something else, coming back to it, going, ‘Okay, now let’s take this to another level.’ Sort of like making a movie. A lot of directors say they don’t finish making a movie; they just abandon the project.”
More than two years ago, Slipknot revealed that a new song, “Long May You Die,” had been recorded during early sessions with Casagrande. Slipknot’s most recent album, The End, So Far, arrived in August 2022 and was the band’s last full-length before the departures of keyboardist Craig Jones — who left in June 2023 — and drummer Jay Weinberg, who was subsequently replaced by Casagrande.
Last fall, Slipknot sold its music catalog — including publishing and recording masters royalties from the band’s archival catalog — to HarbourView Equity Partners. The deal did not extend to future releases. Since their 1999 debut, Slipknot has earned a Grammy Award, logged billions of global streams, and placed six albums in the Billboard 200 Top 10, including three consecutive No. 1s from 2008’s All Hope Is Gone through 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind. The End, So Far debuted at No. 1 in the U.K., Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Mexico.
