In the six years that have passed since the Des Moines, Iowa rock band released their latest record, Hydrograd, there hasn’t been much activity to come out of Stone Sour. Some fans have hoped for a return, but whenever Corey Taylor has something to say about the band, it seems like such a comeback is very unlikely.
In a conversation from earlier this year, referring to Stone Sour, Taylor said that he refuses to “compromise [his] vision and [his] art because of certain people’s hindrances.” More recently, the vocalist echoed a similar sentiment about the band while talking to Grammy.com.
At one point during this new conversation, the interviewer brings up how Taylor has said that, regarding Slipknot, he can only keep up with the intensity of the band’s performances for so long. The interviewer goes on to express that they think it’s a good move on Taylor’s part to transition into exploring other things.
In response to this, Taylor says he’s talked to other members of Slipknot about the band’s future and their physical performances. He eventually goes on to compare his solo act to Slipknot and Stone Sour, and while doing so, he shares that he was “being held back” by “certain people” in the latter.
Here’s exactly what Corey Taylor has to say:
“As a performer you physically want to rise to that occasion. The only thing that holds us back in performance is age, and I’m lucky that I’m healthy enough that I can still go at a certain level. But I know I can’t continue that forever. The guys in Slipknot also know that, and that’s something that we’re talking about very honestly. ‘What do we do?’ ‘What does the next level of Slipknot look like?’
“We’re looking at it from an artistic point of view. How do we make it still seem frenetic and off the chain, but also something that we can deal with from a strength point of view? It’ll be interesting to see where that challenge takes us.
“It also allows me to be able to do stuff like this solo thing. It’s high-energy right now, but when it gets to the point where I want to tame it down a little bit, I have songs that I can lean into and let them do the heavy lifting for me.
“This is probably the closest to the real me as a performer that I’ve been in my whole career. Because obviously with Slipknot, it’s really one side of the genre. With Stone Sour, I was being held back because of certain people in the band. But with this, there are no limitations, and I can do music carte blanche as far as genre goes and performance goes. I have a band that can play anything, which is just criminal. It’s really, really cool. I’m just really fortunate to be in the place where I am right now.”