Slipknot’s Corey Taylor: “My new mask is gonna f*cking scare kids!”

It's no secret that Slipknot have been working on fresh material during the pandemic, but it sounds as though Corey Taylor could well be steaming ahead with the aesthetics of their next era, too, following 2019's We Are Not Your Kind.

Speaking on episode 53 of Steve-O’s Wild Ride! podcast on April 22, the frontman details how the band come up with the concept for their masks on every album cycle – before dropping in the intriguing teaser that his "new" mask is "so gnarly" and even freaks his wife Alicia out.

“Sometimes we have a vision in our head – Clown is really good at it, because he’s an artist, so he’ll go somewhere gnarly and be like, ‘Okay, I’ve got this image…’ and then we’ll have outside people create it," Corey says of the process of creating a mask (transcribed by Kerrang!). "But then there’s some times where you’re just like, ‘I don’t have a real vision, but I have an idea,’ and you talk through it with a visual arts guy or a visual effects guy, and they will create it for you. And then you’ll look at it and go, ‘I like this, change this, blah blah blah.’ And you whittle it down until you get to something that’s really rad.

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“My new mask,” he continues, “is gonna fucking scare kids! It’s so gnarly, dude. It’s really uncomfortable; it freaked my wife out. She won’t look at it – and she loves crazy shit like that. She’s just like, ‘That’s really bothering me, you need to put that picture away!’”

Corey also tells Steve-O of Slipknot's artistic evolution in general: “With every album, we try to give people something different. We give them the Slipknot stuff that they expect, but we also whip some different stuff up. We’re constantly trying to push the boundaries of where we go, music-wise, and I think because of that people have gotten to the point where they never know what to expect with our album. They know they’re gonna get new masks, they know they’re gonna get new outfits, they know they’re gonna get new art… but they never know, musically, where we’re gonna go – which is rad, man!”

Check out the full interview below, with the "new mask" comments around 42 minutes in:

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