It’s been ten years since Tool released their last album, 10,000 Days, and fans have been hearing news about a follow up for most – if not all – of that entire time. Though the newest update from Justin Chancellor doesn’t include any specifics, it does get us very optimistic for future Tool releases.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Chancellor says, “We’ve narrowed things down to big groups of ideas. For the past few months we’ve been working on one of the newer songs fairly exclusively. We get the gist of it and find the main themes that make up the skeleton between verses and choruses. Then we explore different ways we can depart from that and come back to it and flip it upside down, and take the time to see what else is there. Everyone knows we take our time. We’re really trying to be responsible with ourselves in trying to discover ideas that haven’t been discovered before. It’s kind of an alchemy, how we experiment.”
He continues, saying, “We’ve also been through a lot of difficult lawsuits, which we deal with ourselves, and they’re a bit of a bummer and not inspiring creatively… But we’ve fought to be in this position, and it’s almost a responsibility now to take the time to explore special concepts while we’re on this planet. We’re our own worst critics; we’re doing our best to find something that blows us all away, and we want each other to be completely happy with what we produce. I’m excited that there’s going to be another album and the material will be very inspiring. So why rush it now?”
Chancellor says that he, Danny Carey, and Adam Jones have been “playing pretty much nonstop right now,” so hopefully a new album is imminent. He concludes by saying, “All I can say is that we’ll go back Monday and do our best to finish it for you, although that’s not really how it works. But we know the listeners will be happy with it when it’s finished.”
Though Tool did perform new music during recent live shows, the band hasn’t offered any new studio material in many years. We’ll keep our fingers crossed until the next update just the same though.