Plus, dealing with the "bleak landscape" of Iowa helped the bandmembers tap into their pain and write a dark, heavy record that focuses its anger on all the fakers out there. Slipknot have been previewing the disc, Iowa (August 28), during Ozzfest. Now Taylor tells Robert Mancini that Slipknot is ready to spread the hurt, spill some blood and just maybe quit while they're ahead.

MTV: For a lot of people, Ozzfest is serving as an introduction to your new material. How are the new songs being received?

Corey Taylor: They're going over really good. They're a lot heavier and a lot darker than the first album, so people are seeing that we're living up to what we said, what we promised — that we would not do what all these other bands had done, that we wouldn't cheese out. We actually went the other way; we went harder, faster. We went darker.

MTV: At the Ozzfest kickoff, you only rolled out three new songs. Are you going to start folding in more new stuff?

Taylor: We're playing about four new songs, and we play six on our off [Ozzfest] shows, but we're trying to keep the mystique up. We're tantalizing, we're teasing, we're trying to give just enough so people are like, "If that sounds like that, then what does the rest of the album sound like?" We don't want to come out here and blow our load like a lot of bands do. They smear their feces all over the place. [RealAudio]

MTV: Iowa is a dark, heavy record.

Taylor: It was a reflection of how we were all feeling. We went out and toured for two years straight, and the road really beat the [hell] out of us. It was an overall consensus that we wanted to do something a lot darker than the first album.