Corey Taylor isn't mincing words when it comes to the new Stone Sour album -- and yes, he realizes this might offend fans of his other band, Slipknot.

"It's so good, man. Every song has a catchy hook -- even the heavy stuff -- every song is loaded with melody. It's still got the attitude, but it's there. It's probably the best thing I've done in a long time," he told MTV News. "I mean [Slipknot's 2008 effort] All Hope Is Gone was a great album, and I worked really hard on it, but on this album ... coming in with the amount of material -- we recorded 18 songs -- and knowing that every tune not only has its own identity but is damn good, I'm very, very proud of that."

Yes, Taylor is willing to talk at great length about Audio Secrecy, the follow-up to Stone Sour's breakthrough 2006 album, Come What(ever) May. Recorded at Nashville's iconic Blackbird Studios -- the first time he's made an album outside of Los Angeles or his native Iowa -- it's a record positively brimming with ideas, one that, as he put it, represents "everything that we've been threatening to do," even if that means exploring far quieter, more refined sonic territories.

"I finished my last song two days ago, and it's all killer; there's no filler. It's so good. I mean, there's so many vibes and so many styles, but it's all cohesive. The continuity is there," he said. "It doesn't sound like a comp album, it doesn't sound like 12 bands coming in going, 'We're going to record a song!' It sounds like a band exploring, which, to me, is [a] really old-school tradition.

"You never used to go in and just kind of chop out a bunch of songs and throw it out there. The old guard would go in, and they would just record what they had. They would record the songs that they wrote, because they wrote them. It didn't have to sound a certain way, didn't have to be a certain way, it didn't all have to sound the same," he continued. "It had life, and that's what we did with this. ... We just said, 'You know what? We wrote this. So what if this is heavier than that? So what if this is in a major key and these are in minor keys? ... We feel this, so let's go for it.' "

The funny thing is, though he'll seemingly never run out of good things to say about the album, there's plenty he's mum about. Perhaps in keeping with its title, there's still no firm release date for Secrecy, and Taylor wouldn't reveal if all 18 songs would make the final track list ("There's a plan hatching ... that's all I'm gonna say"). And when asked about his favorite song on the album, he would only say, "They're all killer," before singling out a piano-laden track called "Miracles" as a standout.

"I play piano on a bunch of songs. One of them is called 'Miracles,' which is really dark but kind of crescendos into this huge chorus at the end," he said. "There's so much more, though. We have an overabundance of writers in this band. We all write, so it's not a case of one guy writing all the songs or no one writing the songs. It's a complete thing."

While Taylor is playing things close to the vest with Stone Sour, things aren't quite the same with Slipknot. After wrapping a world tour in support of All Hope Is Gone in late 2009, the band went on a rather informal break -- and, from the sound of things, not much has changed since then. For the immediate future, Taylor is 100 percent focused on Stone Sour.

"There's nothing really happening [with Slipknot]," he said. "There's a DVD coming out, apparently, that I will be informed of so I can promote it. Nobody talks to me about these things. I get a complimentary copy. I mean, I still don't have a copy of [the band's 2002 DVD] 'Disasterpieces.' What the f---?"

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