Slipknot percussionist M. Shawn “Clown” Crahan has given Billboard.com some more info on the group’s forthcoming new album. According to Crahan, the band have once again been working with co-producer Greg Fidelman (Metallica, Slayer) on the effort. He further stated that they have been working on material for it since early 2016 and currently have “a plethora of songs, all demoed” for it.
Though a title and release date remain pending, Crahan did seem to hint that the album will arrive sometime around the band’s late spring/early summer touring in 2019. He also shed a bit of light on the concept of the record as well, stating “What I can tell you is I’ve known all the words all the time, so I’ve been able to paint the dream world and the nightmare in my mind.”
He further went on to state that the concept of the album “breaks down to…good vs. evil, or in this sense, evil vs. good. It’s about being a human being and experiencing what you have in correlating it to this world. This world is ugly and it’s supposed to be, and it has to be in order for art to lead to grandness and beauty.”
Earlier in the conversation Crahan also touched on the band’s faux image filtering app, Touché, which they used to tease fans for the surprise release of their new single “All Out Life” last month. For Crahan there was more purpose to the app than just a mere marketing tool:
“This is based off of watching entire families sitting at dinner tables and just destroying their time together on these brainless things. I can’t judge ’em for that. It is what it is. But I think they forget that they used to sit around without them — and that’s a big problem. I mean, you can learn piano or guitar on these (apps), and I’m sure they work, but you can’t forget that you can sit down at a real piano or pick up a real guitar. So (Touché) was a way of saying OK, all these things are in our future — as long as we don’t forget that there is a reality around us.”
