Eighteen years in the vault, 2,300 copies in the wild: the four-piece Slipknot record finally crawls into daylight…so was it worth the wait?

Words & photo by Felix Bartlett | April 23, 2026

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Listening to Slipknot’s Look Outside Your Window feels like a basement door prised open after nearly two decades, the stale air inside still humming with something alive. The same could be said by the masterminds who recorded these ten tracks in Iowa back in 2008 and then let them rot in a vault while the band’s commercial engine rolled on.

Now it’s best to get things straight and be upfront. This isn’t Slipknot. It’s Corey Taylor, Jim Root, Sid Wilson and Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan, four of the nine, moonlighting around the fraught All Hope Is Gone sessions and chasing what Clown has spent years describing as a Radiohead-adjacent psychedelic itch. After one missed release window after another (a planned 2021 drop torpedoed by the pandemic being the most infamous), the record has finally wriggled into daylight as a Record Store Day exclusive, capped at 2,300 vinyl copies worldwide. No streaming, no digital, no mercy. Those who didn’t queue at 5am on April 18 are left to scour the murkier corners of the internet for shared drive links passed around which is, frankly, what gives this album such a beautiful feel.

Opener ’11th March’ takes its time, drifting in on soundscapes before Clown’s toms start pacing in staggered patterns and a distorted bass lurches through the middle like it’s wandered in from another session. ‘Moth’ is where the record plants its flag: a downtuned riff drags in the first verse, Corey’s delivery cracked and wavering rather than the infamous scream we’re all accustomed to. ‘Dirge’ swings between piano-led verses drenched in cathedral reverb and a chorus that fractures into chainsaw distortion. ‘Christina’ hands the mic to Lacuna Coil’s Cristina Scabbia for a brooding Italian recitation that becomes the album’s most quietly magnetic minute. She sticks around to haunt ‘Is Real’, a slow-burner where Jim Root finally gets a chance to perform a proper solo.

Side B is where the record stops feeling like Slipknot with the lights off and becomes its own animal. ‘Away’ rides in on a loose bassline before Sid’s keys bloom into something Pink Floyd-shaped, Corey’s vocal the most exposed on the record. ‘In Reverse’ is the most conventional thing here, closer to a Stone Sour cut than anything in the Slipknot vault. ‘Toad’ is the hidden jewel, an acoustic figure turning surprisingly tender somewhere between early Interpol and Radiohead’s warmer moments. ‘Juliette’ glassy and gorgeous and widely assumed to be a Taylor confessional (“have you found your Juliette?”), builds and simply stops, as if the tape ran out mid-thought. Closer ‘U Can’t Stop This’ is the one genuine misstep, a half-formed sketch that collapses into odd samples.

Clown and Sid’s production holds the thing together with cobwebs and patience. It’s patchy, it’s inconsistent, and it is comfortably the most interesting thing anyone wearing a Slipknot mask has put their name to in years. Albeit if you’re going into this expecting anyting like their early work then I’m afraid you’ll be leaving this listening experience rather dissapointed.

Verdict: 💀💀💀💀

For fans of: Radiohead, Type O Negative, Stone Sour