Slipknot Breaks Three Years of Silence With 'Arsenal'

The video opens on a whisper, a single spoken line: “I hope the bad guys don’t show up.” Only after that does the track kick into full gear, as if the band staged the whole intro just to lull the audience for a moment before hitting them. Slipknot released “Arsenal” with zero warning, no teaser clip the day before, no countdown on social media, which is an unusual move for a band that has spent recent years announcing every step months in advance.

“Arsenal” is the band’s first new material in more than three years, since the 2022 release of “The End, So Far,” and the first song to feature drummer Eloy Casagrande. The video was directed by longtime member M. Shawn Crahan, better known as Clown, and stars actor Jackson White. In the chorus, Corey Taylor repeats just two words, “Let’s go,” before the song pulls back after its first surge into a slower, heavier gear. That opening whisper is no accident either: it echoes the spoken intro to the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right,” a nod that shows the band, for all it has been through, still holds onto a sense of its own history.

Sources disagree on the exact release date. Loudwire and several other music outlets abroad tie the song to September 9, while Serbia’s Headliner dates the release to September 10. Whichever is accurate, this is the first audible sign that something has shifted in the band’s camp after years of relative quiet.

Slipknot has built its identity since forming in Iowa in 1995 around masks, jumpsuits and numbers instead of names, a setup that has survived lineup changes that would have sunk most other bands. Casagrande, formerly the drummer for Brazil’s Sepultura, joined in 2024, taking over from Jay Weinberg. “Arsenal” marks his first official studio appearance, and it is also the first song released since guitarist and sampler Craig Jones and turntablist Sid Wilson left the band, two men who had been part of Slipknot’s signature sound for decades.

What “Arsenal” signals is not just a change behind the drum kit. Guitarist Jim Root described work on the band’s eighth studio album, currently being recorded with producer Matt Wallace, on the RIDE BYND podcast as a return to something Slipknot had lost along the way: spontaneity.

“There’s new life in this material. And having Eloy helps, man. He’s such a talented guy,” Root said on the RIDE BYND podcast.

By his account, at least fifty arrangements are already in the works, ranging from fast, aggressive riffs to slower, heavier doom passages, with parts that at times recall Pink Floyd, a comparison rarely heard from a band whose trademark has long been raw aggression. The new album has no title or release date yet, but the sheer volume of material in progress suggests “Arsenal” is not a standalone single but the first signal of something larger.

“I’m hearing some of these arrangements for the first time as they come together,” Root added, describing the sessions as the closest thing to what he had always heard in his head, something he had never before managed to pull out of the band.

That is where this comeback differs from earlier ones. Across nearly three decades, Slipknot has changed members, tone and production, but it has rarely admitted the writing process itself had stalled. Root’s description of the sessions as jam-style, with Clown, still in charge of arranging even though he no longer performs onstage the way he once did, pulling finished ideas out of them, sounds like a band that had to relearn what it even means to sound like Slipknot after a string of departures. “Arsenal,” with its deceptively simple structure, a fast opening section and a slowed-down return at the end, plays like an answer that isn’t final, just a first attempt.

“Arsenal” does not settle whether Slipknot without Wilson and Jones still sounds like Slipknot; that will take a full album to answer. But as a comeback announcement, the song does exactly what it needs to: it shows that after three years of silence and a reshuffled lineup, the band can still surprise without warning, and that Casagrande’s drumming, judging by this first recording, is a reinforcement rather than a compromise.