Slipknot‘s Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan has explained in more detail why the band’s unreleased album, ‘Look Outside Your Window’, is still on the shelf.

The album was recorded by four members of the metal monoliths during sessions for their 2008 album ‘All Hope Is Gone’. In January 2020 Clown had said he, along with Jim Root, Corey Taylor and Sid Wilson, had intended to release the album of more “experimental, psychedelic” tunes on Christmas Day 2019.

Yesterday (April 10) in an interview with Mosh Talks podcast host Terry ‘Beez’ Beezer, Clown – seemingly despairingly – addressed the issue surrounding the eventual new release, saying, “Don’t make it confusing.”

“Don’t make it something it’s not. Don’t call it something it’s not. Accept it. It’s music. It’s art. It doesn’t carry the Slipknot name.”

Clown continued in the interview to emphasise that the album’s non-release wasn’t being done intentionally to upset fans, nor was it to “prove a point”.

Confirming the album has been mixed and mastered and is “ready to go”, Clown stressed it needs to be released when the band can properly prioritise it, saying it can’t interfere with Slipknot’s other commitments.

Clown confirmed there were several potential release dates over the course of last year but added, “We have never really had a tentative [release date]. We speculate.

“So we get a speculation. We get a date under speculation. But we don’t even really make it tentative. We just kind of throw it out there – speculate.”

Slipknot’s sixth album ‘We Are Not Your Kind’ was released in 2019, and given a five-star review by NME, who called it “a primal scream of endlessly inventive extreme metal and searing misanthropy”.

Both Clown and Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor confirmed last year the band have been writing new music, with Taylor saying in an interview in November, “The plan right now with Slipknot is to try and a) finish up the touring next year, and b) we’re thinking about kind of putting another album out maybe next year.

“I just know that we all kind of feel like there’s unfinished business and we wanna finish that out before we do anything.”