Did that include the ambient ‘indie’ guitar lead on the new ballad Goodbye?

Jim: “The Radiohead-y sounding stuff is Guitar Rig 5! Corey wrote Goodbye and I toyed around with it on my laptop in my hotel room, and the only thing I had to record with was Pro Tools 11.

"I found a nice ambient, airy patch, so I put on my Jonny Greenwood hat from Radiohead and went for it. Some moments on the record are my actual demo versions, because they captured a vibe that was hard to recreate. Goodbye was one of those moments.”

"You wouldn’t have expected me to state Blur and Radiohead as influences. But I get bored and I sit around and play along to songs that I like" - Jim Root

Mick: “We originally thought about using Goodbye as the album opener. Like in Vol.3, where we had some noise shit and then the vocals came in. Goodbye was originally like that; it was an intro that blew up into being more of a song.”

Given some of your earlier experimentation, could Radiohead be an unlikely influence?

Jim: “Radiohead and Slipknot may not be in the same genre, but they are influences in the way they approach guitar. Blur are another band I love; their new stuff as well as the old. A lot of my favourite guitarists are British rock ’n’ roll guys, from Jimmy Page up to Graham Coxon.

"As a writer, I’m interested in how guitar fits into pop music because pop music historically, and recently, isn’t very guitar-driven. So when you have Coxon in Blur, who can make guitar fit seamlessly into that style, to me that’s pretty amazing.”

Yet your playing styles are very technical...

Jim: “My technical style comes from when I first got into guitar and was listening to Metallica, Overkill, Exodus and Megadeth, and trying to nail Dave Mustaine’s riffs from Killing Is My Business... which is basically learning scales in a groovy way. But I never took the time to understand what I was playing or why I was playing it.

"You wouldn’t have expected me to state Blur and Radiohead as influences. But I get bored and I sit around and play along to songs that I like, not just working out the chords, but also what part of the neck the guitarist is playing them on.

"I was doing that today with Robert Plant’s Big Log. All that stuff helps expand your mind. It’s important not to stick to one facet. There are some ripping new players that can harmonise scales up and down the neck and all that shit, but there’s more to guitar than that.”

Mick: “My music is who I am; I play what I play. It’s always fun to branch out and do different stuff, but it’s usually an internal process. There are a few newer death metal bands who are pretty fucking good, who are more technical and aggressive than what we usually do. Bands like Gorod, from France, and Deeds Of Flesh, whose new record Portals To Canaan is bad as shit.”