STONE SOUR frontman Corey Taylor has told Billboard.com that the band has written and demoed 18 songs for its sixth studio album, with plans to hit the studio in January for a likely mid-2017 release.

“It’s some of the best shit we’ve ever written,” Taylor, who is also the vocalist in SLIPKNOT, said. “I’m champing at the bit to record it and get it ready to go. The cool thing is that it’s got a lot of different directions, but at it’s core it’s very hard rock, and I mean that in an almost sort of modern/classic sense. There are some hints of punk in there. There’s some cool hard rock/heavy metal. There’s just all these really cool elements that we’ve never really allowed ourselves to go into. We’re really to kind of push even further with this. It’ll feel like it’s all over the map, but it will be very unifying when everyone hears it. It’s exciting, man.”

STONE SOUR, has released two EPs of cover songs — “Meanwhile In Burbank…” and “Straight Out Of Burbank” — and was slated to issue a third, titled “No Sleep ‘Till Burbank”, but those plans now appear to have been scrapped.

STONE SOUR last year named Christian Martucci as the permanent replacement for Jim Root, who was dismissed from the band in late 2013 after he decided to sit out the group’s last tour in order to begin working on the new SLIPKNOT album. Martucci was recruited to play on that tour and was confirmed as a permanent member in March 2015 in a Facebook post.

Root did not speak kindly of STONE SOUR in interviews after he was fired, saying, “Some of the guys in STONE SOUR, I think they just want to be a radio band and write strictly for radio and try to be more of a poppy rock band. And that’s not really what I’m into. There’s at least one guy in the band that’s only concerned about money. I really have no desire to associate with people like that anymore.”

Root played on all five STONE SOUR studio records to date, including 2010’s “Audio Secrecy” and the band’s last collection of original music, “House Of Gold And Bones”, a double concept album which was released in two parts in 2012 and 2013.

Fonte: Blabbermouth.net