Slipknot are now a very different band from the one that burst onto the metal scene back in 1999. They haven't released any material for nearly six years, and since then they've lost two of their founding members; bassist Paul Gray through a drug overdose in 2010 and drummer Joey Jordison - whose willing departure was announced late last year. These details don't exactly bode well for the release of new material, yet the band are indeed working on their fifth studio release, though little is known about it. There's been a good deal of chatter about what the album will be like. Corey Taylor the band's frontman has said that it's going to incorporate aspects of Iowa and Volume 3: The Subliminal Verses, while also taking the band to new grounds in which case, we're in for a treat. But the group have plenty of convincing to do following their frankly unimpressive 2008 LP, All Hope Is Gone. That album wasn't necessarily poor, but it didn't feel like Slipknot. This wasn't the result of some kind of change in artistic direction, they hadn't gone anywhere new with their sound, hadn't added anything nor were they challenging anyone - they had only lost what had made them so special. All Hope Is gone felt bizarrely insincere, it lacked the aggression and the melancholy of its predecessors, adopting more palatable riffs and melodies in place of the frantic, borderline psychotic sounds that had resonated with so many of their fans. Whether or not the now septet can recapture the chaos that fuelled their earlier work is still very much undecided, but if they stand any chance of making their fifth album as game-changing as their first, second or third, then they've got a lot of work to do.
