Tool have revealed they plan to spend three months “organising our ideas” in the studio this spring as they work on their new album.
The band have not released a full-length record since 2019’s ‘Fear Inoculum’, but as bassist Justin Chancellor recently told Summa Inferno, they intend to get to work on the follow-up after the conclusion of their upcoming Latin American tour.
They are headlining their own festival, Tool In The Sand, across three days in March in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. They will play two sets, with other artists including Mastodon, Primus, Coheed And Cambria, Eagles Of Death Metal, CKY, and King’s X.
After that, Chancellor says they plan to gather their ideas together. “We’ve all shared our individual ideas with each other, and we have a really good pile of stuff,” he said.
“The really difficult process is when you actually get together and make decisions about how it’s going to end up. And that becomes a little more mathematical, a little more like in the classroom – there’s a blackboard and there’s numbers and you have to make decisions. So that’s the stage we haven’t completely pulled off yet, but we’re committed to do that when we get back.”
“We’re gonna spend those few months really organizing our ideas,” he added. “You have to make those decisions, and you have to kind of wrestle with each other a bit to get to that next stage. And then you have to record it, which is a whole other thing as well… It’s like a pregnancy, almost. When you go to the studio, you have to make this final decision of how it’s gonna sound and how you’re gonna play it, and it’s gonna live like that forever.”
When asked about the likely format that the new music will take, Chancellor speculated: “We’ve talked about releasing a single, just one song… We could also release an EP. And I think because we have such a dedicated fan base, everyone’s gonna be up for it… So, we might not necessarily have to really wrestle out a whole album… Or you could release a single and then another single, another single, and then after a year of releasing singles, you could put them all together on a record and make that an album.”
Last year, Chancellor spoke with NME about the pressure from fans to release new music, and when they hope to release the highly anticipated follow-up to ‘Fear Inoculum’.
“The only pressure comes when we announce that we’re working on something new, because then we have to make our own predictions for when it’ll come out, and obviously you feel like you let people down if you don’t release it in a certain amount of time,” he said.
“It’s a nice feeling that people still want new stuff, but also they’ve got to understand that it’s not the easiest thing to do. It’s not a simple thing and it’s not always a natural thing that comes at the time you want it to come. Art is a very strange animal and it has its own schedule.”
In other news, Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan recently posted a personal tribute following the death of his father Mike Keenan.
