Slipknot has moved through another major lineup shift, unveiling a new bassist onstage at Sick New World 2024 in Las Vegas and pushing its rhythm section into a new era without a formal announcement. Fan-shot footage and stage photos from April 2024 showed a masked player whose build and mannerisms matched Simon Crahan, the son of Clown and the former Vended member widely believed to have taken over bass.
The sighting mattered because it filled another gap in a band that has spent the last three years rewriting its roster in public and in fragments. Alessandro Venturella, who had been Slipknot’s longtime bassist, departed in 2023, and the group has not issued a press release naming his replacement. The fresh figure on bass came after percussionist and founding member Chris Fehn left in 2019, adding to the sense that the band’s core identity was being rebuilt one mask at a time.
The new bassist’s appearance also landed as Slipknot’s studio and live activity continued to shift around the same period. The band released the surprise 2024 track Long May You Die through its own channels, and Billboard noted that it was the first recording to feature drummer Eloy Casagrande. Casagrande had quietly replaced original member Jay Weinberg after his sudden firing in November 2023, with reporting from Rolling Stone and Variety saying Weinberg learned of his dismissal shortly after a successful world tour run. By early 2024, the Brazilian drummer had been brought in behind the scenes.
That sequence matters because it shows Slipknot choosing to solve its instability without making a clean public reset. Instead, the band has let the evidence do the talking: masked rehearsal footage, tattoo matches, drum setups, leaked clips, and then, in Las Vegas, a new face on bass under festival lights. The official website has a constantly updated tour page, but as of May 21, 2026, the slate was still lighter than in the band’s pre-pandemic peak years, leaving room for a bigger run to build later.
Corey Taylor made clear in a February 2025 interview that he wanted to dial back his solo workload and refocus on Slipknot, a comment that carried extra weight because future touring was already being discussed in terms of his health stabilizing and the new lineup settling in. Festival announcements, scattered dates and industry chatter have pointed to a more ambitious 2025 to 2026 touring cycle once that happens. For a band that has spent the last several years changing parts in motion, the next phase is less about surprise and more about whether the current formation can hold long enough to tour like a finished unit.
The unanswered part is no longer who is playing the songs. Slipknot has already shown that through clips, photos and live footage. The real test is whether this version of the band, with Taylor back on Slipknot and Casagrande already in place, can turn a string of quiet replacements into a stable road map for the next stretch of its career.
