Slipknot drummer Eloy Casagrande has confirmed that the band is working on a new album, with the Brazilian claiming his parts on the record are all recorded.
Speaking to Craig Reynolds on The Downbeat Podcast, Casagrande said: “I just finished recording the drums, so all the drums, they are recorded. They are done. I finished like 10 days ago or a week ago.”
The hotly anticipated new project will be Slipknot’s eighth studio album, coming over a quarter of a century after their self-titled 1999 debut, and hot off the heels of Look Outside Your Window, an experimental side project released in the summer.
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Details of a full record to follow on from 2022’s The End, So Far have emerged gradually, with guitarist Jim Root claiming last year that there were “six finished arrangements” in the vaults. Casagrande’s comments suggest things have been progressing steadily since then.
Diving into the band’s recent recording process, Casagrande explained: “I didn’t wanna do overdubs, I don’t wanna do push-ins, punch-ins. I wanna just play it straight.”
By all accounts, there’s been a real drive amongst the group for unfiltered, spontaneous collaboration, with Root saying he wanted to “revisit the raw energy of how those first two records were produced”. Interestingly, Casagrande’s experiences teaching drums to kids in Brazil appeared to have a real impact on this side of the process.
“A few years ago I used to give classes in São Paulo,” he recalled. “I used to have many students, and they think that what they listen [to] in a record, especially from the new metal bands, they think that’s the reality. And it’s not. It never is.”
He continued: “When I was recording the songs, I was playing them many, many times — like five, six, seven times each — and the best take was, like, ‘Okay, I think I like the last one. That’s my favorite one. Let’s use it.’
“Sometimes I was putting some songs together — choosing half of one take, half of the other take, but never punch-ins. Never like that. I was trying to keep it real — to be honest, to be like in a real-life situation, that sometimes you’re good, sometimes you’re bad, and you gotta deal with that.”
