In a new interview with Ben Giese, host of the Ride Bynd podcast, SLIPKNOT guitarist Jim Root spoke about the resurgence of nu metal, the subgenre of metal which blends a heavy sound with elements of hip-hop, funk and alternative rock. Once popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it has now found a second life among young listeners, thanks to TikTok and the Y2K revival. Root said: “ That happens, man. That’s like fashion, that’s like movies. Everything has a cycle. Things come in and out of cycle… Which is wild, ’cause the new shit we’re (SLIPKNOT) writing does not sound like that at all. We’re not digressing or de-evolving into that sort of a… There’s elements of it. I mean, we write how we write, so we’re always gonna have a little bit of a vibe. But you’re not gonna hear — for lack of a better term — a nu metal record out of us, if that makes any sense.”

Root continued: “I don’t know that we’ve ever been nu metal. I think we just came out at a time when nu metal was happening, so that’s where we got lumped. ‘Cause when the New Wave Of American Metal happened, they lumped us into that, when I would do guitar interviews with magazines. And I’m, like, ‘Wait a minute. I thought we were nu metal.’ But now we’re doing interviews with LAMB OF GOD and bands like that, and I’m just, like, ‘Okay, whatever.’

“To me, I think we’re just SLIPKNOT,” Jim added. “We’re just SLIPKNOT music. I don’t think there is a box you can put us in. We have so many elements. ‘Cause everybody in the band comes from different musical backgrounds. There are those bands that go out and they kind of create their own thing, where you can hear, like, maybe an influence here and there. Like when you hear U2, there’s not really any other band that sounds like U2 unless they’re emulating U2‘s early career. But they evolved into something that, that’s their own thing. That’s what they do. I suppose you could probably put MUSE in that category, although I do hear a lot of QUEEN influence in some of the stuff that (MUSE‘s Matt) Bellamy‘s doing and the way he writes and approaches music. But there are bands that are uncategorizable, and I think — I don’t know if it’s whether I think or I hope; I don’t know what the right word is, I hope or I think, and/or both — that that is what SLIPKNOT is. Even talking about with the producer we’re working with — 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. This 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.’ And it’s so organic. It’s just SLIPKNOT music.”

Asked to describe the new SLIPKNOT music he and his bandmates are working on, Jim said: “It’s SLIPKNOT, so we’re gonna have a sound, but at the same time, having (new SLIPKNOT drummer) Eloy (Casagrande) in the band… Man, it’s such an honor to be able to jam with that guy, and the way we’re approaching this… Yeah, I can sit at my computer, and I can throw some drum loops up and start writing riffs and layer it, and that’s great. And then I can give it to the band, and Corey (Taylor, SLIPKNOT singer) can put lyrics on it and all that kind of stuff. And it has its place. But the way we’re approaching this, which is similar to the way it was being approached in the beginning as, like, garage-band sort of vibe. Now we’re going to a church, we’re setting up Eloy, I’m setting up a guitar rig, and we’re just jamming for, like, two hours. And then out of those two hours, we’ll go back, and as we’re playing, Clown (SLIPKNOT percussionist Michael Shawn Crahan) will be in the room, and he’s got headphones on, and he might start jamming with us, or he might just be listening to what we’re doing. And he’ll throw his arm up, or he’ll hit the light, and that’s a cue to our producer, like, ‘That’s a part.’ In his mind, he’s thinking, ‘That’s a chorus. That’s an intro. That’s a verse line. That’s a bridge,’ whatever part it may be. But then he’ll look at us, and he’ll be, like, “Stick with that.” Or he’ll be, like, ‘That was cool. Move on. Go somewhere else with that.’ And so what we’ve been able to do is do these jams, and then we’ll take a break. Clown will go in, and I’ll sit with Clown and Matt, our producer, and he’ll just start arranging the song out of it all, out of just off-the-top-of-our-head jams. And it’s so organic and so honest and it’s so open to interpretation.”

Root continued: “I couldn’t tell you what the direction of this next record is gonna be. I know I’m writing some of the fastest grind-picking riffs, some of the most melodic, heavy, doomy kind of riffs. A lot of really pretty, just beautiful, clean interludes and things like that that are finding their way into these songs. A lot of sort of just experimental — I don’t wanna say PINK FLOYD, but maybe somewhere in that wheelhouse.”

Root went on to say that SLIPKNOT‘s way of working on new songs right now is “the most honest way that I can think to write music… When I’m sitting in front of a computer and I’m trying to write a song, it’s contrived. I know that’s what I’m there to do. When we do a jam, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. We could start a jam that happens so cool, we just get a song top to bottom without even thinking about it, because sometimes that does happen. We could jam for two hours and there might be two things in there that are cool that we could use for something else or any combination of all that stuff. But what it’s doing is, is it’s leaving a band of nine guys so free and so open that no matter what a riff is or what a part is… If Mick (Thomson, SLIPKNOT guitarist) hasn’t taken part in one of the jams that we’ve done, he can come in, he can hear an arrangement, and he can be, like, ‘I know what I can do with this, and I’m not gonna do what you’re doing with this. I’m gonna do what I wanna do with this.’ And they can live together. It’s not just, like, ‘We’re gonna come up, we’re gonna meet up here, and we’re gonna play in unison, and then we’re gonna go into the slam part, and then it’s gonna come back out into the verse.’ It’s none of that kind of bullshit. It’s just literally letting it evolve in a very organic, natural way, as it should. And that’s hard to do when you’re not a singer-songwriter. Singer-songwriters can do that all day long, ’cause everything they’re writing is coming out of themselves…”

Elaborating on where SLIPKNOT currently is in the writing process, Jim said: “We have so, so, so, so much material — probably at least 50, like, arrangements. I’m not saying they’re all full songs, and they all need work. We’re trying to leapfrog, go sort of back to the ‘We Are Not Your Kind’ process where start working on something, getting it to a level, shelving it, working on something else, coming back to it, going, ‘Okay, 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. A lot of directors say they don’t finish making a movie; they just abandon the project.”