Members of Tool discuss their long-awaited new album, Fear Inoculum, in-depth in an upcoming comprehensive and rare interview with the band in an upcoming issue of Revolver magazine.
Tool's issue of Revolver doesn't hit newsstands until Aug. 13, but Loudwire is reporting on excerpts from the feature.
Guitarist Adam Jones confirmed that the new album, the band's first in 13 years, is as dense as any Tool work. He estimated the album's run-time to be around 85 minutes, noting that there are seven tracks, two of which are segues. Furthermore, the album feels like "two or three songs in one," Jones added.
Regarding the album's meaning, Jones, bassist Justin Chancellor, drummer Danny Carey and singer Maynard James Keenan agree that there's an arc of maturity to the album, a yearning for transcendence.
"Well, I suppose the main overview of it is getting older and more comfortable with yourself," Carey said. "It's kind of an evolution in that way, getting through and getting over criticisms and our fears of various kinds, I suppose."
Keenan points to a sense of individuality and comfort in one's self as motivating him throughout the writing process.
"I feel like that's always an individual's right to process things in the way they wanna process them, and I wouldn't wanna take that from you," he said. "So if anything is a broad stroke of the album, it would be embracing where we are right now, acknowledging where we've come from and some of the things we've gone through."
Chancellor added that while, yes, the album took an interminably long time to complete, the band feels it has produced a fully realized work, that is ultimately free of the pressure of years of anticipation.
"They've all taken a long time, but I've never felt so satisfied that we did everything we wanted to do," said the bassist. "That's something that comes with maturity. You have to be completely brave and sincere about what you're doing to just not ever compromise and change it to what you think someone else might want."
In the album's title track, released Wednesday, Keenan can be heard singing the words "immunity" and "contagion" at several points. These could be references to the band's philosophy of turning inward and shutting out exterior pressure.
Over the past few years, in interviews and in lyrics on releases from Puscifer and A Perfect Circle, Keenan — a self-described hippie snowflake — has often referred to concerns over the deteriorating state of political and social discourse in America.
In a conversation last week with Joe Rogan, Keenan said he dreamed of producing a reality show in which people from diametrically opposed political backgrounds would be tasked with finding common ground with one another.
Nonetheless, the singer added to Revolver that he believes Fear Inoculum will be a polarizing album, if for no other reason than the time commitment involved in listening to it in its entirety.
"There's gonna be a lot of people who might not get this album because it does take engagement...It's just what we do."
Photo: Getty Images