Earlier this year, founding Slipknot percussionist Shawn "Clown" Crahan teased that the band's much-mythologized unreleased album, Look Outside Your Window, might finally see the light of day in 2023.
As die-hard Maggots well know, Slipknot have been sitting on a whole album's worth of experimental material written and recorded during the sessions for 2008's All Hope Is Gone. Frontman Corey Taylor once described it as having "much more of a Radiohead vibe," and earlier this year he joked that he hopes it never comes out, just because fans have been clamoring for it for so long (15 years now!) that it could never live up to expectations.
Well, now he seems more open to fans getting to hear it, and he thinks that that's finally going to happen in 2024.
In a new interview with NME, Taylor explained that Clown has wanted to release Look Outside Your Window for years, but Taylor keeps lining up releases for his solo project that have interfered with Clown's master rollout plan.
"It's actually funny that you bring that up," Taylor said when the interviewer mentioned the long-awaited album. "I was talking to Clown about it the other day and he goes, 'One of the reasons it hasn't come out is because you keep putting shit out which keeps conflicting with when I want to release it!'
"I was like, 'Fuck dude, why didn't you tell me?' He says, 'Fuck, Taylor — you just got too much shit!' It's sounding like he's got a release date that he can finally lock in and I have promised him that I won't release anything that will ruin that. I think it's going to be next year — finally, man!"
We'll see if that actually happens, but with Taylor's next sophomore album, CMF2, arriving this fall, and no word of any brand-new Slipknot material on the horizon, it does look like 2024 will be open for the 'Knot to finally gift fans the long-lost record.
Later in the interview, Taylor described the sound of Look Outside Your Window, once again emphasizing that it's nothing like what fans would typically expect from Slipknot.
"I just went back and listened to all that stuff and it's so dope and so different," he enthused. "People going into this thinking it sounds like 'Slipknot' Slipknot are so wrong. It doesn't sound like anything Slipknot have ever done, that's why it's its own thing.
"To me, it really is the long-lost album. The music is so beautiful, it probably has some of my favorite melodies that I've done, and people are really going to dig it. Clown did a really good job."
