The story of Slipknot’s lost album, “a la Radiohead”

The Slipknot machine is unstoppable and their fury never seems to subside. While the masked band has exhausted the live commitments scheduled so far, and from the new drummer Eloy Casagrande comes news on new music coming soonthe percussionist and co-founder Shawn “Clown” Crahan he’s back to talking about an album that fans have been waiting to hear for many years. It is a project born in the shadows of 2008, surrounded by legends, internal tensions, small frustrations and great expectations, recorded when Slipknot were a creature that was both explosive and wounded at the same time. Now Clown swears that 2026 will finally be the good yeargiving life back to the myth of “Look outside your window“, the “lost” album that has hovered like a ghost in the band’s discography for over fifteen years.

The story of “Look outside your window”

“Look outside your window” was born during the tortured and bifurcated sessions of 2008’s “All hope is gone”.. While the entire nine-piece lineup recorded the fourth official album, a second core composed of Corey Taylor, Jim Root, Shawn “Clown” Crahan and Sid Wilson began developing completely different material, in a separate studio at Sound Farm Studios in Jamaica, Iowa. The two sessions ran in parallel like two souls of the same band: on the one hand the abrasive heavy metal of Slipknot, on the other a freer, melodic and experimental path. As told by the Clown himself on “Kerrang!” in 2018, it all began almost by chance. Shawn Crahan and Root found themselves working together on more intimate and atmospheric ideas, soon joined by Taylor and Wilson. The project, in the words shared by Clown in 2020 with the “NME”, became a one-of-a-kind work, which “didn’t fit” into the Slipknot world and he proposed himself more like a sort of emotional laboratory in which to explore sonic territories that had no space in the band’s collective fury. Recalling that period, Corey Taylor explained in 2019 that while the official album followed the group’s “usual” direction, the other material “it was much more melodic… much more Radiohead-esque”, with an alternative rock approach and an artistic research far from the typical brutality of the masked formation.

Jim Root, for his part, recalls sessions that were totally outside the box. As the guitarist told “Revolver” in 2019, the four musicians experimented to the point of “record the sound of a frog to build a song around itor make Taylor sing from the bottom of a well to obtain a cavernous and dispersed effect”. This is where “Look outside your window” took the form of an intimate and antithetical work to Slipknot. This parallel process was based on acoustic instruments, fingerpicking, minimal percussion And attention Almost obsessive about atmospheres. The sessions for this lost album therefore served as therapeutic relief valve for Crahan, Taylor, Root and Wilsonto make peace with the internal tensions, personal pressures and chaotic environment that characterized the band at that time. Paul Gray, bassist and emotional heart of the band at the time, attempted to participate but was excluded. The project was considered too personal and fragile to be opened to the rest of the lineup. His absence is reflected in the melancholic tone and themes of loss that emerge in the songs, especially after his death in 2010.

The main recordings took place between February and June 2008but post-production continued into the next decade. As confirmed by the musicians involved later, by 2021 the album was fully mixed and masteredcomposed of 11 tracks for a total duration of 40–50 minutes. In 2024 Crahan confirmed that the artwork was also ready and that everything was in the hands of management. Yet, despite numerous leaked rumors and repeated declarations about its imminent release, “Look outside your window” is still locked in a drawer, despite having been defined by Corey Taylor as a “timeless” work and Root even went so far as to threaten personal leaks.

The training involved

Unlike Slipknot’s usual nine-headed machine, “Look outside your window” took shape in a more intimate dimensionalmost secret, in the hands of a quartet working away from the noise of the rest of the band. Leading it all was Shawn “Clown” Crahanthe visionary pivot of the project: it was he who defined the atmosphere, who pushed the others towards a more ethereal and experimental language, building a sound that was like nothing Slipknot had ever released. Next to him, Corey Taylor put aside the vocal aggression which made him famous in the heavy metal band, in favor of a softer and more vulnerable voice moving into territories close to alternative rock. Jim Rootusually the architect of very powerful metal riffs, here he played with a different touch preferring clean guitars, melodic arrangements, light lines which almost seemed to float. Finally, Sid Wilson added his surreal touch, but in a more intimate and personal form, far from the theatrical charge he brings to the stage. The absence of key figures such as Joey Jordison, Mick Thomson or Paul Gray it wasn’t a void, but a choice. It was precisely that silence around the creative core that fostered the fragility, instinct and freedom that would give life to a work unlike any other in the band’s history.

What “Look outside your window” sounds like

The album represents a radical departure from the Slipknot language. No distorted guitars, no blast beats, no screams: in their place, acoustic rock punctuated by folk, ambient and post-rock elements. The arrangements are sparse but full of emotional tensionbetween layered guitars, light percussion, ethereal atmospheres and Taylor’s surprisingly sweet voice.

Far from the group’s sonic violence, “Look outside your window” investigates themes of introspection, loss, reconciliation and fragilityalmost like an open diary on the emotional tension experienced by the band in 2008. Clown explained that the album was born as an “honest” gesture: “It was a very honest action to create music that wasn’t Slipknot, but that exploited the abilities of the boys without any rules”. For this, it is a record that favors feeling over power, vulnerability over angerartistic research to shock.

The songs of “Look outside your window”

There full tracklist Of “Look outside your window” remains shrouded in mystery. No one, not even in the years of teasers and contradictory statements, has never released an official track list. All we know is that the album includes eleven tracks, all recorded in 2008, during those famous sessions parallel to “All hope is gone”. Yet, over time, some titles have started to circulatealmost like fragments of a puzzle left incomplete on purpose.
As per the interviews or indiscretions of the members of Slipknot themselves, and collected by fans in the various dedicated forums, one of the songs included in “Look outside your window” is “Chapter one, the eleventh march“. This piece is described as a rarefied introduction, dominated by piano and strings, of which a very short snippet has been circulating since the days of recording. Then there is “He directs“, presented as a crescendo instrumental, built on slow percussion and ambient sounds that expand like a ritual. Another track is titled “In reverse“, described as a mid-tempo made of reversed audio, layered vocals and a structure that seems to move in reverse. “Juliette” appears as the most intimate parenthesis, presented as an introspective ballad with acoustic guitar, while “Moth” remains a working title linked to a song described as ethereal, almost impalpable.

However, not everything about “Look outside your window” remained locked in the drawer. Two songs born from those same days have already found a place elsewhere. “‘Til we die” was released as a bonus track to “All hope is gone” and is often used as an epilogue to concerts, and “My pain“, which would then take definitive shape within Slipknot’s subsequent productions. The rest, for now, remains in the shadows.

Because the project has been postponed so far

The history of the album is a long sequence of postponements, changes of plans, new record cycles and internal frictions. The first official statements date back to 2018, when Clown retraced the period of “All hope is gone” ten years after its release in an interview for “Metal Hammer”, and revealed for the first time the existence of “Look outside your window”. On that occasion, the percussionist explained that the sessions for Slipknot’s fourth studio work had proved so chaotic that they split the band into two unofficial factions, leading one half of the group to record what would become the project that remained in the drawer for years. “Working on that material kept me balanced“, Clown said when talking about “Look outside your window” for the first time in ten years.

The following year, Corey Taylor spoke out about the unreleased material during an interview with SiriusXM and said, “They’re very solemn, very energetic, very artistic songs. For people who are used to the classic Slipknot sound, this is nothing like that at all. It’s got a much more rock vibe.” Always in 2019during the promotion of “We are not your kinds”, Clown spoke about the project “Look outside your window” revealing that it was supposed to come out as a surprise at Christmas that year. The publication never took place. Between 2020 and 2022 Shawn Crahan continued to leave clues, but the release was postponed due to the pandemic, tours, Knotfest and the attention paid to other albums such as 2022’s “The end, so far”. Corey Taylor in 2023 further fueled the confusion, when the singer declared that he hoped the “lost” album would never be released, fearing that expectations had become too high. Crahan also set a new hypothetical release date for 2024, but to date the album has not yet seen the light.

Last year, Jim Root even went so far as to tell “Metal Hammer” that he was so sick of waiting for “Look Outside Your Window” to come out that he threatened several times to release it illegally and call it a day: “I keep telling Clown I’m going to upload it to YouTube and then put the link on Instagram or something,” the guitarist said: “And he’s like, ‘Don’t do it, man, really.'”

The last update was back in January, when Clown said the project had been mixed and mastered and even had a cover. “It was never a Slipknot album,” he stated. “Not while we were making it, not in the ten years I kept it, and certainly not fucking when it comes out.”

Only nowafter a last update last January in which it was confirmed that the project had been mixed and mastered and even had a cover, Clown has returned to address the issue directly during a Q&A session on Discord captured on Reddit,. The percussionist stated:

“I know I told everyone it would come out this year. I’m so sorry it didn’t happen that way. Things always happen that change plans, especially when it comes to the art we create. I want you to know that 2026 will be the year. The time has simply come, and I myself got tired of waiting. Have faith. I promise.”