Shaun "Clown" Crahan and Jim Root have been working on new Slipknot songs for at least a year. In past interviews, Clown noted there are  27 new song ideas floating and as of the the beginning of November, Clown claims the band have seven or eight songs completed.
Corey Taylor has been kept in the loop, and last month Taylor revealed he's basically done writing lyrics, telling Billboard:
The guys are writing tons of music and I've written lyrics to almost all of it and we're going to start trying to put together demos here and there with the time off that I have and really try to get ahead of the curve as far as what happens next.
Late last night, the band posted a photo of Taylor and Crahan out of masks to the Slipknot socials with the caption "2019."
2019 pic.twitter.com/Lt8udtoJb6
— Slipknot (@slipknot) April 20, 2018
It's interesting the band is back to teasing the album will be out in 2019. While  Taylor has said Slipknot's new album will "absolutely arrive in 2019," but in that same Billboard interview he backtracked those claims just a bit:
I know that we're gonna try and put an album out next year — however, that is all speculation. The best way to make God laugh is to announce your plans out loud. So I'm just going with the flow. The plan right now is next year but that is a huge plan because we still haven’t narrowed anything down, so we will definitely see what happens.
Perhaps the band is further along than he thought last month and the schedules are being formulated. Meanwhile, Clown is set to make his solo debut in June at the Montebello Rock Festival, and I'm sure he'll being press around the performance, so we are likely to get an update then.
