SLIPKNOT percussionist Shawn “The Clown” Crahan has revealed that the band have “seven or eight” new songs written for the follow-up to 2014’s “.5: The Gray Chapter”.

Clown spoke to Metal Hammer about the progress of the songwriting sessions for SLIPKNOT’s next slabum, saying: “‘The Gray Chapter’ was pretty much the final learning velocity of our career. We had to replace a bass player, we had to replace a drummer — one of them was walking the earth, the other was buried in the earth. It was a very hard time. People were telling us, ‘How is the band gonna write? Joey and Paul are gone.’ Fuck you. We made a fucking awesome album that we love. And we’re gonna continue to do that. I actually have a date that some of us are gonna get together in a studio and get things going for the next one.”

According to Crahan, he, guitarist Jim Root and drummer Jay Weinberg went to Los Angeles earlier in the year to “organize everything we had written out on the road. We wrote fifty fucking ideas,” he said. “We spent two weeks organizing all that, and also adding some stuff that was written a year ago.”

Shawn added: “We have over twenty-seven ideas ready to go — seven or eight of them are full songs. These songs can change, they can be written over, nothing is in stone. But it’s great that we have concrete ideas to begin with. So the future has never been sweeter for SLIPKNOT music.

“I don’t know what Corey’s got in mind, because he will bring his own songs, too, but we’re just writing music and getting ideas and moods and soundscapes — getting it all fucking together,” he said.

SLIPKNOT recently premiered the documentary “Day Of The Gusano”, about the band’s first-ever visit to Mexico City, focusing on the importance of its fan base of “maggots” and featuring a catalog of live performances from the concert.