SLIPKNOT Will Not Perform At This Year’s KNOTFEST, Says COREY TAYLOR

For the first time since its 2012 inception, SLIPKNOT‘s Knotfest music festival will not include performances by the band that founded and curated the event.

According to Billboard, this year’s Knotfest festivals, including one already announced for October 28 in Toluca, Mexico, and a U.S. date, again paired with Ozzy Osbourne‘s Ozzfest, expected to be announced on July 10, will feature appearances by STONE SOUR, which is fronted by SLIPKNOT singer Corey Taylor.

Taylor recently told Metal Wani that “nothing” was going on with SLIPKNOT nearly three years after the release of the band’s comeback album, “.5: The Gray Chapter”. “We ain’t doing shit for two years,” he said. “I’m doing STONE SOUR. [Percussionist] Clown‘s doing his movie thing. Everybody’s kind of doing their own thing right now. So we’re just kind of letting ourselves have some time away, which is cool. Sometimes you just have to do that — sometimes you have to go away and let people miss you. So that’s what the plan is right now — just us kind of hanging out, letting everybody kind of catch their breath and then we’ll figure it out from there.”

SLIPKNOT‘s touring cycle in support of “.5: The Gray Chapter”, ended in November, with Taylor returning to STONE SOUR this year.

“.5: The Gray Chapter” was released following a six-year hiatus during which founding SLIPKNOT bassist Paul Gray died and drummer Joey Jordison was dismissed.

Ozzfest Meets Knotfest, a combination of the two hard rock and metal events that first took place last September at San Manuel Amphitheater and Festival Grounds in San Bernardino will make its return to the Southern California venue this fall.

The San Manuel Amphitheater and Festival Grounds is where Ozzfest began in 1996 and where Knotfest was staged in 2014 and 2015.

Knotfest held its third event in 2015 and second as a Southern California weekend destination festival.

When asked in 2014 interview with OC Weekly why SLIPKNOT decided to expand Knotfest from one-day events in the Midwest to a weekend-long festival in California, Taylor said: “It was a practical decision. We knew we weren’t going to do it [again] until October [2014]. [Considering] how frigid it is in late October, it made sense to bring it to the West Coast where it’s a little less chilly. It could also afford us a way to do two nights in one spot and expand on what we started with. The cool thing is, now that we’re kind of starting to see what we want to do with Knotfest, we’re really able to elaborate on everything and build everything up to what we see. For us, we want to try and recreate the European festival vibe that you get with Download, Rock Am Ring and Rock Im Park and with Graspop [Metal Meeting] in Belgium. You get this huge experience at these festivals in Europe and, unfortunately, not a lot of Americans get to see that. This is a way to put something together like that here.”