And they have the boring, self congratulatory press release to prove it!!!!!111:

New York, NY – On July 1, Slipknot, the Grammy Award winning, multi-platinum nine man hard rock enigma, will unveil its new imagery in an exclusive partnership with AOL Music, the web’s most trafficked online music destination*. This highly anticipated debut kicks-starts the launch of Slipknot’s new album, All Hope Is Gone, which is set for release on Roadrunner Records on August 26th. Masks are an integral part of the band’s identity and to reflect this point, AOL Music’s Spinner.com will host a retrospective photo gallery of Slipknot masks throughout their career, spanning all three previous albums and including the most recent controversial “Purgatory Masks.” The Slipknot mask unveiling will be featured on the main page of Spinner.com worldwide for 24 hours.

Slipknot is a groundbreaking nine-piece machine born out of Des Moines, IA. The band has sold over 10 million albums worldwide. Their last studio album VOL. 3: (THE SUBLIMINAL VERSES) was released in May 2004, debuted at #2 on the Billboard Top 200 Chart, selling over 240,000 copies its first week and 1.5 million copies in the U.S. to date. The album broke new ground for the band and spawned the hit singles “Duality,” “Vermilion” and “Before I Forget.” In November 2005 the band released SLIPKNOT 9.0: LIVE, a gold-certified double live album. December 2006 saw the release of the DVD Voliminal: Inside the 9. Certified platinum, it is a vivid, brutally honest glimpse of the world inside the band.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to clown (OMG PUN) on Slipknot. In fact, the couple of times I’ve seen them live they were pretty badass. It’s just that, when it comes to masks, and metal, you can’t fuck with GWAR. Seriously:

The Littlest Biggest Big Little City in the World: As that annoyingly familiar “whomp whomp whomp” of tires speeding along the chain-worn asphalt of Interstate 80 hit my ears, I realized that it’d been exactly one year since I had last escaped eastward from California over this same mountain pass. 365 days of nothing but sitting and thinking and drinking and eating and basically being a piece of shit; 365 days of inching closer to the final fuck off. But now I was once again doing what people do to forget about how meaningless and stupid there lives really are, journeying from point A to point B and back in search of the proverbial greener grass. Only problem was, I was heading to Reno, and anyone who’s had the pleasure of spending time in Reno, as I have, knows that the grass there ain’t very green. In fact, they don’t really even fuck with grass over there. It’s just rocks and dirt and a bunch of bright lights telling you where to go to forget about yourself as fast as possible.

$3.99 Ham and Eggs: If Las Vegas is the embodiment of Sin, then Reno is the tenth circle of Dante’s hell. The city is like Disneyland for the desperate alcoholic middle class of Northern California and Western Nevada; it’s Las Vegas for people too well off to be considered “poor” but too broke in spirit to make the trek “all the way” to Las Vegas, or bother with the natural beauty and facade of class available in South Lake Tahoe. Reno is where you walk out of a 100 million dollar casino and into someone’s weedy front yard. We pulled into town Virginia St., past myriad hour-rate hotel marquees proudly boasting of “elevators and color TVs,” past Circus Circus and Harrah’s and their 24-hour “$3.99 Ham and Eggs,” taking a left before passing beneath the infamous “Reno: The Biggest Little City in the World” sign. It didn’t take long to find that out for ourselves, as the bright lights quickly gave way to the dim blight of crummy pawn shops, shuttered warehouses and bars where not-smoking seemed to be illegal and the Video Poker machines were set to pay out once a year at best. Looking west, an optimist could easily feel like they were in Vegas, with the towering hotels and flash bulbs arcing into the evening sky. In all other cardinal directions, however, even an optimist feels compelled to put his wallet into his front pocket and keep his eyes on his feet.

Mel’s: Needless to say, I ended up drunk and hungry, and hey there’s Mel’s Original Diner, conveniently located inside the Sand’s hotel!  It was midnight but breakfast sounded pretty damn good. If Las Vegas is the city that never sleeps, Reno is the city that never really wakes up, so why not eat a chicken fajita omelet and a chocolate shake on a stomach full of beer and forest fire smoke and 27 years worth of angst? In my defense, I tried tried to order the gardenburger, but the waitress said they “hadn’t had any of those in months.” So fuck it, I said, give me the omelet and a chocolate shake and get your sweet ass out of here. Some guy was puking in the bathroom sink and we laughed while trying to figure out if Mel’s was the diner in American Graffiti or Alice’s Restaurant, but old Mel had the last laugh, that’s for sure. We pulled over in Grass Valley around 2:00 AM and I puked my damn guts out in the bushes outside of a Jack in the Box. It actually felt good, in a miserable kind of way.

The Box Score: Total time elapsed: 12 hours (six in the car). Total money lost gambling ($20). Total Beers Drunk: Too Many. Total Food Left in My Stomach After Epic Projectile Vomiting: none. Total Waste of Time: Yes, definitely.

The Moral of the Story: The problem with going anywhere, is that no matter where you go, there you are. I’d rather just stay home with my cats. Cats don’t need to go anywhere to be happy. My cat’s been outside of my house probably 4 times in his entire life, and he seems pretty damn happy. I wish I was like a cat. Maybe someday I will be.

If, like me, you’re gonna get belligerently hammered tonight, be sure to pour a little out for Eric Morris, who died Tuesday after getting on some serious gurp:

Eric Morris, 26, was allegedly taking part in a drinking game with another patron at an adult nightclub, Angels Show Bar, in Seffner, Fla., just hours before he died, according to police.

“Apparently [other bar patrons] were describing the shots as ‘cherry bombs,’” said Callaway, referring to a shot of liquor that is typically made by combining cherry-flavored vodka with Red Bull, a popular energy drink.

While Morris’ drinking buddy, who police declined to identify, stopped playing the game after a few shots, Morris kept going.

I mean, not to disrespect the dead, but if your die from drinking something called a “Cherry Bomb” you kind of went out like a sucka. When I die of alcohol poisoning, I want to go out like Nick Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, drinking straight shit vodka in the shower then dying while being rode hard by Elizabeth Shue.

At this moment, just a couple thousand light years from the edge of our neighboring dwarf galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud, itself about 210,000 light years from earth, a star, 1E0102.2-7219 to be exact, goes supernova, dissipating into a cloud of soft blue. As you consider the distances involved in this rather pedestrian astronomical event, and you consider the timelines inferred - that even if man were to one day find a way to travel at the speed of light, it would take over 200,000 years to get to the epicenter of this supernova, which has already been in the process of exploding for over 2,000 years itself - realize that the span of one human life is an incalculably insignificant moment occurring in an infinitesimally tiny corner of an immense and possibly unending universe, which itself may be just one of an infinite number of universes existing concurrently in a cornerless, borderless ocean of time of space. One day our sun will explode and all trace of any physical human life on the planet earth will be incinerated. Even the natural memory of time will one day be washed clean by a black hole, or by the slow crawl of universal expansion, leaving no trace, no reminder that anything had ever happened, or that there was ever anything at all, period. Maybe its possible that this abject emptiness, this absence of any “thing,” is GOD, but more likely it is just nothing. Stephen Hawking proposed that eventually universal expansion will revert to universal contraction, and that as space sucked back in on itself, time would begin to replay exactly backwards, and that our lives would be lived exactly as they were, only in reverse, born in death and dying in birth, only to be reborn the next time around.  So as you go about your life today, perhaps you’d be best served to live your life the way you’d want to live it, over and over again forever. Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time,” and though he was much more of a spiritual optimist than I, the point is this: life might be all you get so don’t fuck it up. Anyways, I’m gonna get some lunch.

Video Matt can usually keep his cool around the swinging dicks he typically associates with, but watch as pop-songstress and fashionista Katy Perry seems to get your boy a little rattled when she puckers up and tries to lay some lips on him. MEMO TO VIDEO MATT: when the broad with the #1 song on the Billboard charts makes kissy noises next to you, GO FOR IT BRO!!!11

Just in case downloading it for free was a little too much trouble, Nine Inch Nails will be releasing The Slip as an actual CD later this month. Here’s the release, complete with tourdates and everythang:

Nine Inch Nails’ The Slip, currently available only as a free download at NIN.com, will be issued July 22 as a limited edition physical CD/DVD through the band’s own Null Corporation label.

The CD version of The Slip will be limited to 250,000 copies worldwide, each in an individually numbered six-panel digipak that includes a bonus DVD of performances filmed during rehearsals for NIN’s upcoming Lights In The Sky tour, as well as a 24-page booklet and exclusive sticker pack.

The gatefold vinyl contains one 180-gram vinyl LP and a 24-page booklet, and is neither limited nor numbered.

The Slip is 10 new songs written and performed by Trent Reznor with Josh Freese, Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini. Justin Meldal-Johnsen will round out this NIN lineup for the upcoming tour, dates of which are as follows:

07/25/08 - Pemberton, BC - Pemberton Festival
07/26/08 - Seattle, WA - Key Arena at Seattle Center
07/28/08 - Edmonton, ALB - Rexall Place
07/29/08 - Calgary, ALB - Pengrowth Saddledome
07/31/08 - Winnipeg, MAN - MTS Centre
08/02/08 - Minneapolis, MN - Target Center
08/05/08 - Toronto, ONT - Air Canada Centre
08/07/08 - Uncasville, CT - Mohegan Sun Arena
08/08/08 - Worcester, MA - DCU Center
08/12/08 - Knoxville, TN - Knoxville Civic Coliseum
08/13/08 - Duluth, GA - Gwinnett Arena
08/15/08 - Oklahoma City, OK - Ford Center
08/16/08 - Houston, TX - Toyota Center
08/18/08 - Dallas, TX - American Airlines Center
08/20/08 - St. Louis, MO - Scottrade Center
08/22/08 - Cleveland, OH - Quicken Loans Arena
08/23/08 - Auburn Hills, MI - Palace of Auburn Hills
08/25/08 - Toledo, OH - Seagate Convention Center
08/27/08 - East Rutherford, NJ - Izod Center
08/29/08 - Philadelphia, PA - Wachovia Center
08/31/08 - Lexington, KY - Rupp Arena
09/02/08 - Morrison, CO - Red Rocks Amphitheater
09/03/08 - Salt Lake City, UT - The E Center of West Valley
09/05/08 - Oakland, CA - Oracle Arena
09/06/08 - Los Angeles, CA - The Forum