SLIPKNOT Frontman Says Next Album Will Be 'Very Melancholy'

SLIPKNOT percussionist M. Shawn "Clown" Crahan and vocalist Corey Taylor have spoken to Billboard.com about the possibility of the band recording a new studio album.

Taylor has been ambivalent about working on new material following the death in May 2010 of the group's bassist, Paul Gray, although Crahan and drummer Joey Jordison have been much more confident about the band recording again.

According to Crahan, he and his bandmates are "just taking our time. Everyone is still getting through the grieving process their way, remembering Paul Gray the way they need to and helping themselves get through this time because it's still very fresh and it's still very serious and hurtful and unbelievable." Crahan adds that "There's no talk of a new record, but there's a lot of stuff that everybody's got. Everybody's got ideas and everybody's writing, but it won't happen until we get together as a band and have a big discussion about what it is we want to accomplish. We lost a very important piece of our enigma, and we're not going to get together and bust through it just to bust through it because everybody wants us to." He predicts that the next album "is going to be very sad. It will have that layer of anger and hate and evil that will come with being just so sad, but... I think a really, really, really special change in our career is coming. I don't think it's going to be better, and I don't think it's going to be worse. I just think it's going to be different. I think that's what we want, and I know that's what Paul would want."

Echoing Crahan's comments, Taylor tells Billboard.com, "We know that everything we do on that album is going to be about Paul. It's going to be very melancholy. It's going to be a more saddened form of rage when it does happen, and it'll be a whole path that we've never gone down before." He adds that he personally is "not as anxious to make a new album as maybe certain people in the band are, and I know a lot of the guys in the band feel the same way I do, whether they want to admit it or not. It just makes more sense to try and figure things out before we try to get into a studio... I don't want to risk losing what we've built because somebody's trying to prove a point."

SLIPKNOT completed a European festival run this past summer, which marked the band's first live gigs since Gray's passing.

Jordison told The Pulse Of Radio not long ago that he thinks the band's next album could be its most intense. "We're a family, and losing a family member sucks," he said. "But you can't help that, but you need to move on and I think that what we're gonna do might be the most powerful thing that we've ever created."

SLIPKNOT's last record, "All Hope Is Gone", was released in 2008.

Taylor and Crahan recently confirmed that SLIPKNOT will tour the U.S. sometime next spring.

Quality HD video footage of SLIPKNOT's June 30, 2011 concert at Ledovyi Dvoretz in St. Petersburg, Russia can be seen below.