M. SHAWN CRAHAN On SLIPKNOT's New Album: 'It's Like Discovering Us All Over Again'

SLIPKNOT perscussionist M. Shawn Crahan has told U.K.'s Kerrang! magazine that the band's upcoming album is "like discovering us all over again."

Due on August 9, SLIPKNOT's sixth LP is once again being recorded at a Los Angeles studio with producer Greg Fidelman, who engineered and mixed the band's 2004 album "Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)" and helmed ".5: The Gray Chapter".

While frontman Corey Taylor has described the band's new full-length as "'Iowa' levels of heavy," Crahan says that it is similar to SLIPKNOT's early days, only for a "new generation" of fans.

"I would have to say [the new album is] like discovering SLIPKNOT all over again — but the way it always needed to be," he told Kerrang!

"I'm not a fan of the sound quality of our first album, because there's a noise in my head. I'm not speaking for anybody else here, and I'm not trying to take anything away, so, please, don't fuck up my words here. The bottom line is, for me, there's a noise in my head that's constantly going as I grow old.

"When I started the band, I was 26 years old, okay?" he continued. "I'm going to be 50 in September, and the noise changes. So this album is like… not being given another chance, because we don't need a chance. We're here. But this album is like discovering us all over again as older human beings. You got a certain sort of war in '98, and now you're going to get another war in 2019.

"No albums are better or worse than each other, and they're all important to our legacy, and our story," he added, "But what I'm trying to tell you is: that first album is like being smacked in the face with a garbage can, or a bat. It's a fucking assault on your soul. With this album, because I don't know what tomorrow is going to bring, I have to look at this being it. Every time we come out, people are like, 'What's SLIPKNOT going to do? Who are they going to be?' And I really feel this is like me coming out again. I can't explain it. But it's like discovering us all over again. We're back to help the new generation discover it like they first did in '98."

SLIPKNOT's new album will include the recently released standalone single "All Out Life", which arrived last October.

Some of the record will deal with Taylor's depression that led to a divorce and forced him to "figure out who I was" without relapsing into substance abuse.

SLIPKNOT's video for "All Out Life" was directed by Crahan.

".5: The Gray Chapter" was released following a six-year hiatus during which founding SLIPKNOT bassist Paul Gray died and drummer Joey Jordison was dismissed.

".5: The Gray Chapter" sold around 132,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 1 on The Billboard 200 chart. The CD arrived in stores in October 2014 via Roadrunner.

Gray died in 2010 from a drug overdose, while Jordison was let go in December 2013, just before SLIPKNOT began recording the last album.