SLIPKNOT’s Shawn Crahan and COREY TAYLOR recently spoke to Billboard.com about their latest release, the 10th Anniversary Edition of Iowa and their plans moving forward since the death of their beloved friend and band member, Paul Gray. You can see and extract from that interview below:

…in the wake of bassist Paul Gray’s 2010 death, percussionist M. Shawn “Clown” Crahan tells Billboard.com that “we’re just taking our time. Everyone is still getting through the grieving process their way, remembering Paul Gray the way they need to and helping themselves get through this time because it’s still very fresh and it’s still very serious and hurtful and unbelievable.”

Because of that, Crahan adds that “there’s no talk of a new record, but there’s a lot of stuff that everybody’s got. Everybody’s got ideas and everybody’s writing, but it won’t happen until we get together as a band and have a big discussion about what it is we want to accomplish. We lost a very important piece of our enigma, and we’re not going to get together and bust through it just to bust through it because everybody wants us to.”

For his part, however, Crahan expects Slipknot’s next recording, if it transpires, to dovetail somewhat with “Iowa,” which he recalls as “a very dark, painful time” for the Iowa-based heavy rockers. He predicts that “what’s next is a lot of what ‘Iowa was,’ but different. ‘Iowa’ was very angry and very hateful and very evil, and…this is my opinion only, but I think (the next album) is going to be very sad. It will have that layer of anger and hate and evil that will come with being just so sad, but… I think a really, really, really special change in our career is coming. I don’t think it’s going to be better, and I don’t think it’s going to be worse. I just think it’s going to be different. I think that’s what we want, and I know that’s what Paul would want.”

Frontman Corey Taylor concurs with Crahan’s expectations, saying that “we know that everything we do on that album is going to be about Paul. It’s going to be very melancholy. It’s going to be a more saddened form of rage when it does happen, and it’ll be a whole path that we’ve never gone down before.” For that reason, Taylor adds, he personally is “not as anxious to make a new album as maybe certain people in the band are, and I know a lot of the guys in the band feel the same way I do, whether they want to admit it or not. It just makes more sense to try and figure things out before we try to get into a studio… I don’t want to risk losing what we’ve built because somebody’s trying to prove a point.”

Performing live as Slipknot, however, has been “awesome” according to Taylor, which is why the group plans to build on this year’s appearances in Europe and Brazil with a run on February’s Soundwave Festival in Australia and then a summer tour that Crahan says will run “from middle June to the middle of August, two and a half months…Our U.S. fans will get us, and the band will get to be together and that’s really important stuff. We are keeping it alive by committing to these shows.”

You can read the full article by clicking here and you can find out more info and pick up a copy of the 10th Anniversary Edition of Iowa by pointing your mouse in this direction.