RollingStone.com has posted a short review of six unmastered songs from SLIPKNOT's forthcoming album, "All Hope Is Gone", due on August 26 via Roadrunner Records:

"The album — the first Slipknot record to be recorded in the band’s home state — kicks off with a spoken word intro, as frontman Corey Taylor gradually grows more and more agitated, snarling, “Where are your gods and politicians?” and “You rage for no reason because to have no reason.” The first full song, “Gematria,” features twin guitar solos from Mick Thompson and Jim Root as Taylor repeatedly asks, “What if God doesn’t care?” while the band’s multiple percussionists generate a din that’s more suffocating than ever. Taylor repeatedly invokes America on the lengthy track, and his thoughts aren’t especially ambiguous.

“Sulfur,” featuring the album’s first dose of clean singing, is in the vein of Taylor and Root’s other band, Stone Sour. “Psychosocial” (yes, they do find a way to include the song title in the lyrics) slows down the tempo to bludgeon with a steady, pounding groove instead of all-out thrash in a manner reminiscent of the band’s more slow-burning but still malicious second album, Iowa. That track is capped off with a time-signature shattering guitar/drum breakdown that will leave the best air-instrumentalists stumped. “Dead Memories” contains a gentle piano bridge that lasts just long enough to be torn apart by Joey Jordison’s thundering drums; Jordison is the early frontrunner for the album’s MVP, especially with his black metal-inspired, blastbeat-heavy performance on the title track.

“Snuff,” the most melodic of the six songs previewed, could be the missing second half of “Circle” from Vol. 3, the band’s first full-on acoustic number. Taylor has said he turned to the outside world for lyrical inspiration this time, but “Snuff” finds him looking decidedly inward, singing, “My heart is just too dark to care” and “My smile was taken long ago” over strummed chords."