Corey Taylor may have cautioned about the dangers of social media addiction in Slipknot’s 2021 single, ‘The Chapeltown Rag’, but the admired metal frontperson hasn’t given up the habit. In fact, he used social media to announce a new Slipknot album is on its way in 2022.
Tweeting under the handle @CoreyTaylorRock, Taylor made some predictions for the year ahead. “Big Shit Coming, 2022 edition,” he wrote. “ZvN updates, SK album, secret ‘homecoming’ plans, etc. Stay Tuned!”
It’s not hard to decipher Taylor’s newspeak. “ZvN” refers to the film Zombie vs. Ninja, a so-called “gonzo horror comedy”, written by Taylor and reported to have begun shooting in 2021.
Meanwhile, “SK album” can only mean one thing: Slipknot’s seventh album will be released this year. The band’s most recent LP, We Are Not Your Kind, came out in August 2019. The Iowa band released the aforementioned single, ‘The Chapeltown Rag’, in November 2021 ahead of its live premiere at the Los Angeles edition of Knotfest.
The song’s lyrics were inspired by the 1977 murder of British teenager Jayne MacDonald by the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, in the Leeds suburb of Chapeltown. Though, Taylor said he wanted to use this story as a launchpad for addressing broader contemporary themes.
“It’s coming from a point of talking about the various manipulations that can happen when social media meets media itself. And the different ways that these manipulations can try to pull us in different directions, in the fact that we’re all becoming addicts to it, which is very, very dangerous.”
‘The Chapeltown Murder’ was produced by Joe Barresi, who mixed both We Are Not Your Kind and 2014’s .5: The Gray Chapter.
