In a new interview with NME, Shawn Clown Crahan discussed Eloy Casagrande’s contribution to the band.
“He’s a phenomenal person and I love his passion for the instrument. It’s on a level that we’ve been around before,” the rocker shared his experience. “There was a heavy bar in Slipknot when we were coming up, way before we got signed, and if you couldn’t hold on you got left behind. This isn’t a stab at anything that has been, we’re just talking about now. There are a lot of OGs in the band and we have a lot of feelings that we acquired from the very beginning. It’s an important life lived, and it’s a lot to expect people to understand that and take it seriously when they enter this process.”
He continued: “[Newer members] have only made it in because they’re able to understand that, add to it and become part of it. Eloy seems to be the final piece and, because of that, there’s a new lease of life on everything. It’s an honest pleasure to see him perform with us every night. It seems like it was meant to be because, here we are doing the anniversary tour which I had a lot of reservations about a year ago, but now I have those same great feelings that I did 25 years ago when we did it the first time around. It feels meant to be and it feels beautiful.”
The drummer got a call from Slipknot’s manager in December 2023. He left Sepultura two months later, just before rehearsals for their 40th anniversary farewell tour began. Soon after, he replaced Jay Weinberg as the drummer for Slipknot’s 25th anniversary tour.
In another interview, Corey Taylor explained why the band picked Casagrande as their new drummer “I think we just kinda went, ‘You know what? Let’s just tell people.’ It was really as simple as that, you know? Eloy was the only one who was brave enough to get in the room with us. There were a handful of other people that we were looking at, and none of them wanted to jam with us,” he explained.
The band described their former drummer’s departure as a creative decision, while Weinberg said that he felt ‘heartbroken and blindsided.’ He has since played with Suicidal Tendencies and Infectious Grooves.
Slipknot’s most recent album, ‘The End, So Far‘ was the band’s last with Weinberg and keyboardist Craig Jones.
