During a recent appearance on the Turning Wrenches podcast, SLIPKNOT guitarist Jim Root was asked if the band intends to tour extensively in late 2025 and throughout 2026.
No, man. We have been doing a lot of touring, and we’ve kind of had to do it because of our drummer swap situation,” Jim responded (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “And once we got Eloy [Casagrande, new SLIPKNOT drummer] in the band, we needed to get out there and get in front of people and show people why Eloy is part of SLIPKNOT. And that was extremely important to us. And that leads to now that Eloy is in the band, we need to write a record.
“It’s really hard for me personally to be creative when you know you have a tour looming over your shoulder,” he continued. “I need to know that I’ve got some time off so that I can, like… This is my desk [at my home studio] behind here. I’ve got my reference monitors and the computer I record on. And I need time just to sit here and come up with ideas and layer and make arrangements that I can send off to Corey [Taylor] and Clownand all that stuff. So, after this European run — I told our manager, I’m, like, ‘Stop booking tours, dude. Stop it.’ I get it. It’s SLIPKNOT, so there’s always offers coming in. And it’s hard to say no, because there’s guys in the band that in some ways… We always love playing shows, love playing live shows, but there’s some guys in the band, some of the newer guys, that they need the money ’cause they’re family guys and they have families. And they’re hired members of the band, and we don’t wanna have to have them go back to work when we get off tour.
“We wanna be able to make enough money that we can still pay them so that we can work on music and get them out to the studio that Clown likes to use and just be creative and work. And you can’t do that unless you have revenue to do that. But I kind of put my foot down and was, like, ‘We need to stop, man. We just need to stop.’ ‘Cause I wanna write a record, and we owe it to Eloy to write a record. We need to get Eloy in a room and start jamming and getting creative and get all the rest of the guys in the band and start riffing out and then building them into songs. Plus I need the time for myself just to sit here at this desk and be creative. And it’s coming back.”
“I know I saw a little bit of a viral post about me. The press always takes your s**t out of context, and it was, like, ‘Don’t expect the record anytime soon,’ type of thing,” Root added. “And that was done a few months ago [last December] on the last tour when I was [in London at the end of SLIPKNOT‘s fall 2024 European tour and] very tour weary. Well, that’s not the case anymore. I’ve got, like, six new arrangements that I think are worthy of giving to the rest of the guys. I won’t give the guys stuff that I don’t think is worthy of being on a SLIPKNOT record and there’s enough room there that everybody can put their input on and we can take it to that level. And right now I’m looking at six [songs] and I have four more that I’m working on. And I’d like to have 20 or 25 before we actually start doing pre-production and rewriting and rearranging and Corey putting lyrics on everything. So, no tours coming up. It’s probably gonna be a while before we do another U.S. run or a European run. The last thing we did was — we did South America and Mexico, and then we did Australia and New Zealand. And that kind of kicked my ass a little bit. It took me almost about a month to recover from that — my sleep. Just the jet lag. You cross the international dateline, so you get home before you left, and it’s 30 hours of being in the air and traveling.”
When asked about the possibility of SLIPKNOT releasing a new single in the coming months, Jim stated: “Earlier I said I’ve got, like, six finished arrangements that so far nobody else has heard yet. They’re about ready to go to Clown and Corey and then filter out into the rest of the band. I would really like to release something before we start working on a [full] record, ’cause it’s gonna take us… I think we need to be able to take our time to write and do pre-production, and that’s gonna take a while. So I would like to get something out sooner to kind of satisfy… I don’t know if it would show a direction or not. It depends on what arrangement it is. But of these six [songs] that I have done now, I’m willing to throw those out to the rest of the guys and see if any of them grab their attention. And we could very easily, after we get back from Europe, get out to Clown‘s studio and then start working on one and put one out. I’d like to do one, two, maybe even three in the meantime, as long as that affords me the time to keep writing and still have 25 separate from those three that we could work on before.”
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