Jim Root Says New Slipknot Album Does NOT Sound Like Iowa
By the far the best moment of Kerrang!‘s video interview with Jim Root at Download Fest this past weekend comes when the Slipknot guitarist is asked by the interviewer about comparisons the new album has been getting to the band’s landmark 2001 breakthrough Iowa. When she informs Jim that it was a comparison, singular, and that the idea originated with his own bandmate Corey Taylor, you can all but see the mental eye-roll as he bobs his head up knowingly and exclaims, “Ohhhh, OK.” Oh, that silly Corey, always saying things!
Corey’s comments came last year when he told an interviewer that We Are Not Your Kind would be “Iowa levels of heavy,” and then again just last month when he said it had “Iowa moments” (and Vol. 3 moments, too, to be fair). But Jim, it seems, does not think We Are Not Your Kind sounds like Iowa at all. Here’s his full answer:
“No, no. I would never in a million years compare anything we’ve done to anything we’ve previously done. I don’t believe in it. I think it’s bad, because you could say, ‘Oh we’re gonna write the heaviest album of all time,’ or ‘We’re gonna write an album that sounds like Iowa,’ and even if we set out to try do so it would never compare. We’re not those people anymore, we’re not that band anymore. That was a place and time, a snapshot of who we were at that time, and to try to recreate that I think it would be contrived and our fans would see right through it. And even if it was a great, really heavy, aggressive, organic record like that, the comparison wouldn’t match up to it. I like to look at it as an evolution.”
Root goes on to say that if there’s anything about the new record that’s similar to Iowa it’s the recording process, which consisted of the band jamming and recording together as opposed to the piecemeal way they put together the past two albums. So at least there’s that, although I hardly imagine that’s what Corey meant.
Check out the interview below. Slipknot are on tour now in Europe and will come to North America later in the summer.
