Corey Taylor Reveals Story Behind Stone Sour’s ‘Hydrograd’ Title

Stone Sour are inching closer to the release of their highly-anticipated Hydrograd album. Frontman Corey Taylor has hyped up the album as "flat out rock 'n' roll in its best form" and has now revealed where the album's mysterious title originated.

Fans have been wondering what the significance of the album title is as it is not a word in the English language and searches have turned up little otherwise. In an interview with Detroit, Michigan's WRIF (audio below), Taylor told the story of how the Hydrograd title was born.

"I'm running through this airport in Eastern Europe. This was only a few years ago. No offense to the airport — it was kind of antiquated; they hadn't really upgraded anything," the singer began. "So the gate info was all on those old-school '80s block-letter, number, digital horrible Timex watch kind of readers. This would have been top of the line in Times Square in, like, 1968, let's put it that way. So not only is it impossible to read, it's also scrolling back and forth between Cyrillic and regular English letters. It's also scrolling back and forth between different languages," Taylor continued.

Going into further details, Taylor explained, "So my brain is trying to do geometry while also at a sprint because I don't wanna miss my plane. I pass one and I look up and I could have swore it said 'Hydrograd.' And I kept running for a second and I was, like, 'Hydrograd? Where the hell is Hydrograd? What?'" Returning to the gate and waiting for the text to cycle through, hoping to catch the word once more, Taylor realized he had erred. "Nothing. It didn't say 'Hydrograd.' It didn't even start with an 'H.' It wasn't even close," he recalled.

Pondering when his "sanity split," Taylor decided, "Well, it's a cool name," and held onto it. "I actually named one of the songs I wrote 'Hydrograd.' And I was, like, 'You know what? That would be a good name for the album overall and just kind of run with it.' So that's it, really — it was what I saw but didn't really see," the frontman finished up.

The opening track off Hydrograd, "YSIF," has also piqued the curiosity of fans and Taylor shed some light on the meaning of the acronym. Without going into to much detail, the singer explained how the band turns adversity into art, revealing the song stands for "You Suck in Full."

With "Fabuless" and "Song #3" out now, fans can start to get an idea of what to expect from Hydrograd. The album will be released on June 30 through Roadrunner and fans can pre-order their copy at the Stone Sour website. The group will hit the road this summer providing support for Korn and all stops can be found at our 2017 Guide to Rock + Metal Tours.

Stone Sour's Corey Taylor on WRIF

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