Jim Root Pushes Slipknot to Lock In and Focus on New Album

In a fresh appearance on the Turning Wrenches podcast, the Slipknot guitarist opened up about where his head’s at creatively: he’s got six new song ideas ready, with four more in the works — and he’s eager to bring them to the band.

Root admitted that during the height of touring, he had “nearly zero” creative inspiration, especially after the pandemic-era material left him feeling uninspired. But with the band’s tour schedule winding down, that spark is back.

“We have been doing a lot of touring, and we’ve kind of had to do it because of our drummer swap situation. And once we got Eloy [Casagrande] 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,” explained Root.

“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.”

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’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. 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.”

“I’d like to have 20 or 25 before we actually start doing pre-production and rewriting and rearranging and Corey [Taylor] 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.”

“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.”

“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.”