Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg has shared what he thinks is the most important advice for being in a band.
Speaking to online music retailer Sweetwater, Weinberg, the 30-year-old son of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg, explained that “being tight” is “above all” when it comes to being in a good band. Speaking on how he personally got to that level with Slipknot, who he joined in 2014, he explained:
“A piece of advice that my dad passed down to me that I’m always grateful for, that’s kind of key information for any drummer to have, is you’re always gonna be best served with whatever practice you’re doing is to a metronome. And to me, playing along to a metronome, doing exercises and just playing beats and stuff while keeping myself accountable, learning how to play with it as an instrument, to me, that’s been what serves the music that I love to play. It kind of adds that frenetic energy where it feels like a freight train that’s about come off the tracks, but the important thing to me is that it’s gotta never come off the tracks. Being tight is, to me, above all. Any band that’s impressive to me has always just been tight together.
“As I apply that to a band like Slipknot, we don’t play live to a metronome or anything like that; we just do what we do because we listen to each other. And the practice of hearing that metronome in my head allows me to feel the space in between notes and how I’m filling that, and that helps inform how I’m speaking musically to the guitar players and the vocalist and stuff like that. It’s got that energy to it, but it always has that invisible swing that’s super important to this kind of music.”
Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor said in February that “massive” news regarding the band would be announced “in the next month or so.”
As for what that could be, there has been speculation he may have been referencing Look Outside Your Window, the album Taylor, Shawn “Clown” Crahan, Jim Root, and Sid Wilson recorded during sessions for 2008’s All Hope is Gone, which Clown said in January of 2020 would be released “this album cycle.” Taylor has previously said that the eleven-track record has “a Radiohead vibe.”
Taylor could also be referencing entirely new music: this past November, Clown revealed that the band were working on new songs. Shortly thereafter, Taylor said that “we’re thinking about kind of putting another album out maybe next year.” Then, in December, Weinberg told an interviewer that he “can’t talk about [new music],” which at least kinda suggests there’s new music about which to talk.