"You get one chance at grabbing lightning": Corey Taylor says Stone Sour were "never going to have the same impact" as Slipknot

Everyone knows there are more strings to Corey Taylor's bow than just being the singer of Slipknot. Having also brought his other band Stone Sour to major international success and more recently reinvented himself as a maverick solo artist, his second solo album - the appropritately titled CMF2 - is just a week away from release, and the accompanying tour dates will carry him through to December.

But fans hoping for a Stone Sour comeback in 2024 are likely to be disappointed. Following on from comments earlier this summer where he admitted "hindrances" were keeping him from reuniting with the group, Taylor expanded on his complicated relationship with the band as part of a feature interview in the new issue of Metal Hammer. Speaking about resurrecting Stone Sour in 2002 while on a break from Slipknot, Taylor admits, “it was a very selfish thing."

"I knew that at the time I didn’t write music as good as the guys in Slipknot, I wasn’t confident in my abilities, I contributed that much [makes tiny space between his thumb and index finger]," he tells Metal Hammer. "Reforming Stone Sour meant I got better as a songwriter and was able to contribute music to Slipknot. But it came from a purely selfish place of just wanting to feel like I could do it.”

He also point-blank dismisses any notion of creative rivalry between his groups. Asked if there was any part of him that wanted Stone Sour to become bigger than Slipknot he emphatically answers, "No."

"I knew we would never have the same impact. You have one chance at grabbing lightning, and Slipknot was that chance. When I was young, maybe I wanted to have more credit [for Slipknot] from an ego standpoint. It’s only in retrospect that you can look at it and go, ‘I was actually a very big part of it.’”

As for the band's future, Taylor is equally direct. “I’m in no hurry to do it again, let’s put it that way," he says. "Why? The reasons are nobody’s business.”

Read the full interview in the new issue of Metal Hammer, on sale now.  Order it online and have it delivered straight to your door.