Slipknot's Jim Root Wants To Go Old School With New Album

05-26-2025

Slipknot guitarist Jim Root says in a new interview that he want's to return to the rawer sound of the band's earlier records for their next album, and he also has several tracks ready to send to his bandmates for the effort.

Root made the comments in a new episode of the Turning Wrenches Podcast. He shared, "I want to make a raw album that kind of like, you know, I don't ever want to repeat myself, we don't as a band ever want to repeat ourselves.

"But I would like to revisit the raw energy of how those first two records were recorded and even into the 'Volume 3' record... There's just something really stripped down and punk rock about it and I think we've been missing that on our past few records and I think it's time to get back to that in some ways."

He also revealed, "I've got like six finished arrangements that so far nobody else has heard yet. They're about ready to go to Clown [M. Shawn Crahan] and Corey [Taylor] and then filter out into the rest of the band. I would really like to release something before we start working on a record.

"Because I think we need to be able to take our time to write and do pre-production and that's gonna take awhile, so I would like to get something out sooner to kinda satisfy... I don't know if it would show a direction or not, it depends on what arrangement it is.

"But of these six I have now, I'm willing to throw those out to the rest of the guys and see if any of them grab their attention. 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 would like to do 1, 2 maybe even 3 in the meantime. As long as that affords me the time to keep writing and still have 25 separate from those 3 that we could work on before.

"You always want to have way more material than what you're gonna need, because you might be working on something that you think is absolutely amazing, but then once you actually start recording it, it kinda loses the vibe. And then there's always that one weird song that you don't think is great, and then all of a sudden that turns into the song that's like, 'Woah, where did this come from? This thing's a banger.'

"'Devil In I' is one of those songs. I wrote that song and I thought it was really repetitive and I hated it and it was just gonna become like a filler idea. And then all of a sudden that's one that we always throw in live sets, and the record label wanted to make it a single, and I'm just like, 'Really? It's almost like the same two riffs over again.'

"It literally, as long as it took me to play that song, is as long as it took me to write the arrangement for it, so... things surprise you. So it would be cool to sort of throw something out there as sort of a single or an EP." Check out the full podcast episode below: