Slipknot have marked their return with the jarring surprise new single ‘Arsenal’, their first new music in three years and since the departure of Sid Wilson.
Launched with a typically nightmarish music video directed by M Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan and starring Jackson White to match the harsh fever dream of the track itself, with frontman Corey Taylor spitting about how he “fought a fucking god and the god lost” and staring down naysayers as he warns: “I know I’m a hack and a has-been, but motherf*cker I’m a .45 and not a Mach 10.”
Fans have been quick to highlight their surprise at how much turntable scratching the song features, especially given this year’s exit of Sid Wilson.
Guitarist Jim Root was quick to respond to rumours of Wilson’s leaving the band at the start of last month, telling fans “don’t believe everything you read”. The masked metal icons then confirmed that they would “no longer be associated” with the keyboardist and turntablist in a post that they swiftly deleted, before Wilson updated his Instagram profile to reveal that his time in the band was from “1997-2026“.
He doesn’t feature in the music video, with the latest press photo notably only showing eight of the famous usual line-up of nine members.
Back in July, Root shared that the band “have so much material” and were working on a new album with producer Matt Wallace [Faith No More, Deftones, The Replacements].
“We’re working with Matt Wallace right now to write this stuff – and there’s times where we just kind of sit back, and we’re listening to what I just worked on, and I’m just like, ‘Wow, this is wild’,” Root explained. As for the style of Slipknot’s new material, the musician said it “sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before, yet there’s a familiarity to it that feels like I’ve been listening to it my whole life”.
He went on to describe the songs as “so organic”, adding: “It’s just Slipknot music.”
He continued: “We’re trying to leapfrog, go sort of back to the [2019 album] ‘We Are Not Your Kind’ process where we start working on something, getting it to a level, shelving it, working on something else, coming back to it, going, ‘OK, now let’s take this to another level’, and sort of doing that leapfrog where we can let everything evolve and hopefully at one point get to where it’s like, ‘I don’t know if we can let these evolve’. Sort of like making a movie.”
The band’s last release under the name Slipknot was 2022 album ‘The End, So Far’, though they did tease a new song, ‘Long May You Die’, recorded shortly after drummer Eloy Casagrande joined.
In April, Slipknot finally released their long-awaited ‘lost’ album ‘Look Outside Your Window’ under that name for this year’s Record Store Day. A full series of physical editions followed later.