SLIPKNOT percussionist M. Shawn "Clown" Crahan and Murphy Quint, the head distiller at Cedar Ridge Winery & Distillery, recently answered a number of questions submitted by members of the band's fan club, Outside The 9. Part four of the question-and-answer session can be seen below. Asked about SLIPKNOT's art direction going forward, Crahan said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "For me, I spend a lot of time looking at society, listening to society, putting my ear to the street, staring at the sky, watching people on the phone, watching people at dinner, picking up little bits of information here or there. And when you do that, and you don't do it with a strict hand, you just kind of massage it, things start connecting themselves to each other. But if you force it, you can't get 'em to adhere to one another. But if you just open your eyes, pay attention and understand where you're at and maybe what you're getting into, which could be an album a year from now. But the direction is always what's going on with the beat of the world, what's happening with everyone. And it usually filters into me and somehow it gets to a larger place, and then more people get involved, and then the direction starts showing itself. But you never just wake up and admit to yourself it's gonna go one way because there's so many people involved, and you want everybody involved, and you want everybody's opinion and you want it to be beautiful for everyone. So the direction, especially on a stage, even the masks, even the music, we take this probably the most serious — absolutely the most serious. You never know where the direction's gonna go. Right now we're writing, and I'm still trying to connect dots between songs and understand where we're going; it just hasn't quite hit yet. We have a plan, but all the dots have not adhered to each other to point to a direction yet." Last October, Crahan confirmed that SLIPKNOT had been using some of the downtime during the coronavirus crisis to work on new material. SLIPKNOT's latest album, "We Are Not Your Kind", came out in August 2019. The disc sold 118,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in its first week of release to land at position No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. Furthermore, the album made an impact worldwide with No. 1 debuts in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia, Canada, Japan, Ireland, Belgium, Portugal and Finland, as well as Top 5 debuts in Germany, France, Norway, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain and New Zealand. "We Are Not Your Kind"'s sales in the U.S. were boosted by a concert ticket/album sale redemption offer with SLIPKNOT's summer 2019 tour.
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