For almost 20 years, Slipknot’s side-project Look Outside Your Window was a thing of myth. Recorded during the sessions for 2008’s chart-topping All Hope Is Gone, it was announced 15 years ago and finally got a release date in 2026. The 10-song album finally came out for Record Store Day on Saturday, April 18, and marked a stark detour in the Slipknot sound, swapping ferocious metal for avant-garde slow-burners.
Although recorded during the Hope sessions, Look… doesn’t feature the full Iowan nine-piece. Frontman Corey Taylor, guitarist Jim Root, percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan and turntablist Sid Wilson recorded the album as a separate unit. Fed up with how regimented their ‘main’ album sessions were under producer Dave Fortman, the four set up their own studio to improvise some softer, free-flowing material. They then recruited Lacuna Coil singer Cristina Scabbia, who dated Root from 2004 to 2014, for guest appearances on two tracks.
“We were literally going in a different building, which was in front of the studio, to create other music,” she remembers. “It was just a beautiful, calm, creative bubble. Think about some musicians in a house writing whatever they want with a pure spirit, without thinking about pleasing a record company or a crowd. They just let the music flow, and I gladly contributed.”
True to that off-the-cuff spirit, Scabbia says she wasn’t formally asked to sing some parts, but naturally got involved.
“I found myself singing harmonies and recording vocals for the pure pleasure of doing it and being with people that I loved,” she explains. “I wasn’t intimidated at all: it was liberating and natural for all of us, without any pressure or deadlines. Luckily, usually artists don’t need a reason to create. We just translate our feelings and thoughts into lyrics and music.”
The first track on which Scabbia appears is her (misspelt) namesake, Christina. It’s a spoken-word piece, where she reads a poem written by Clown, which she translated to her native Italian.
“He asked me to translate it as he liked the sound of the language,” she recalls. She can’t remember what it’s about, though. “I have to re-listen to it all,” she admits.
Her other performance is on earnest rocker Is Real, where she sings back-ups to a crooning Taylor simply because “it was in my style and was missing some touches here and there”.
The rest of the songs form a diverse yet moody whole, inspired by everyone from noise-rockers Big Black to Radiohead. U Can’t Stop This is a seething, dissonant crawl, whereas Juliette is a 90s-style alt-rock stomper. Toad integrates acoustic textures and field recordings, and Away evokes vintage blues by contrasting heavy percussion against ominous guitars.
Despite that wealth of material, just one song, the bittersweet Til We Die, made it onto Hope, and even then it was only on the special edition. Though there were other previews in the following years, they were rare. Juliette was on the soundtrack to Clown’s 2016 film Officer Downe, and My Pain, from 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind, was based on an idea from the sessions.
Rather than scrap everything else, Slipknot sealed it in their vault. Rumours of a “secret” album circulated before Taylor confirmed that the stories were true during a 2011 Q&A. He revealed the title and said it’d drop “hopefully within the next year” – the first of many self-imposed deadlines the band missed.
Chatter picked up again in 2018, when Clown told Metal Hammer, “I’ve held onto [the songs] for 10 years because it hasn’t been right, and I’m going to let you know now that it’s feeling right.” In later interviews, he predicted a release sometime during the We Are Not Your Kind touring cycle, then 2023, 2024 and 2025. Needless to say, all these dates came and went without a note.
Fans got impatient, as did the band themselves: Root confessed to Hammer in ’24 that he’d more than once threatened to leak the album and get it over with. Scabbia admits she’s surprised that it’s actually out.
“I had the feeling it was gonna happen,” she says. “But knowing that it came out so long after [it was recorded], to me, it’s like something genius: something like a treasure lost and found after many years. There’s a magic vibe around it, for sure.”
Any attempt by fans to upload the music to YouTube has been promptly taken down since it was first made available on Record Store Day. Demand was unsurprisingly immense, but new vinyl and CD packages became widely available in June. Whether or not it’ll make it onto streaming services remains a mystery.
“I’m still waiting for my copy,” Scabbia reveals. “But it’ll arrive soon and I am excited!”
This article originally appeared in Metal Hammer issue 415, July 2026, which you can order now. Look Outside Your Window is available on CD and vinyl.
