Although it has been reported on some blogs and web sites that SLIPKNOT frontman Corey Taylor gave the rest of the band "homework" to do for their next studio album, he tells Artisan News that he was misquoted. "I never fucking said that," Corey says. "What I did was is I asked them to jot down their feelings, no matter how good or gnarly they are, about [late SLIPKNOT bassist] Paul [Gray] and about his passing and how it affected them. 'Cause for this album — if and when we make this new SLIPKNOT album, which will probably be a while; it'll probably be a year and a half, two years — for this to work, everyone has to have a voice on this album. And I refuse to let it be anything other than that — whether it's riffs, whether it's lines, whether it's full-blown songs; it doesn't matter. Everyone needs to have a voice on this album or it's just not meant to be. So I've been encouraging the guys to kind of just write stuff down, no matter how trivial they feel it is, just write it down and give it to me, and we'll find some art in it."

Taylor told Loudwire that SLIPKNOT will play five festival shows this year, all overseas, and that other, unnamed members of the band are "getting healthy and trying to stay healthy," although he did not go into detail.

He mentioned a similar timeline in that interview as well, saying that the band would begin demoing material in late 2014.

SLIPKNOT's last U.S. performances were its own Knotfest shows, which took place last August in Council Bluffs, Iowa and Somerset, Wisconsin.

SLIPKNOT bassist Paul Gray died in May 2010 from an overdose of drugs — a devastating tragedy which brought the other members of the band closer together and helped them reconnect after they grew apart through years of touring and success.

"We had all stretched ourselves into different lives for the most part, and then we lost Paul," Taylor told DesMoinesRegister.com in August. "It was such a shock to us that it made us sit up and look at what we were doing with our lives and how we were toward each other. We were so close in the beginning, then for whatever reason we all drifted apart here and there.

"Losing someone like that, a great friend and an amazing brother — someone who is so important to the band in so many ways — you start to look at what you take for granted."

Gray made his final recorded appearance on SLIPKNOT's 2008 album, "All Hope Is Gone", which was certified platinum by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) in August 2010 for shipments in excess of one million copes in the United States — the band's fourth consecutive full-length release to achieve the milestone.