Jim Root has said that Slipknot’s new single ‘Arsenal’ will not feature on their upcoming album, and was instead “a tune we could quickly get out there while we work on the rest of the record”.
The metal icons returned with the surprise single earlier this week – with the track marking their first new music in three years, and first release since the departure of Sid Wilson and the joining of drummer Eloy Casagrande.
Since it dropped, the single has got mixed reviews online, with some fans enjoying the new approach, while many others have criticised it for feeling like too much of a deviation from their usual sound. There has also been backlash towards the song’s chorus, which sees frontman Corey Taylor simply repeat “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go“.
Now, guitarist Jim Root has spoken out about the harsh comments towards the new song, and said that it is not reflective of the album that they are currently working on.
In the comment section of a now-deleted post on Instagram, Root replied to one fan who asked if he was upset about the criticism of the song.
“It depends on the commenter, really. I mean, what’s their band doing?” he said, before confirming that the song is a standalone single, and different to the songs that they will be including on the upcoming record.
“’Arsenal’ was a tune we could quickly get out there while we work on the rest of the record. It’s not really representative of the other tunes,” he added, before doubling down and confirming that the single will not be a part of the new LP.
“No. This was just one that we could finish ‘sooner’ to get out there,” he wrote.
In response to the new song, fans have also shared some surprise at how much turntable scratching the song features, especially given this year’s exit of Sid Wilson.
Root was quick to respond to rumours of Wilson’s leaving the band at the start of last month, telling fans “don’t believe everything you read”, although they later confirmed that they would “no longer be associated” with the keyboardist and turntablist in a post that they swiftly deleted.
Arsenal will NOT be on the new album
byu/Proton_Optimal inSlipknot
Wilson then clarified things by updating his Instagram profile to reveal that his time in the band was from “1997-2026“. He doesn’t feature in the music video, and the band now seems to have eight members, instead of the famous line-up of nine.
The new album will be the first since 2022’s ‘The End, So Far’, and while details about the upcoming LP remain vague, the band have revealed that they’ve been working with Matt Wallace on the record and have “so much material”.
“We’re trying to leapfrog, go sort of back to the [2019 album] ‘We Are Not Your Kind’ process where we start working on something, getting it to a level, shelving it, working on something else, coming back to it, going, ‘OK, now let’s take this to another level’, and sort of doing that leapfrog where we can let everything evolve and hopefully at one point get to where it’s like, ‘I don’t know if we can let these evolve’,” Root said over the summer. “Sort of like making a movie.”
While the band haven’t released an album since 2022, they did tease a new song, ‘Long May You Die’, recorded shortly after new drummer Eloy Casagrande joined in 2024, replacing Jay Weinberg.
In April, Slipknot finally released their long-awaited ‘lost’ album ‘Look Outside Your Window’ under that name for this year’s Record Store Day. A full series of physical editions followed later.
