After teasing new music for over a year, Tool’s Justin Chancellor has once again assured fans that a new album is on the way. Following their upcoming Latin American tour, he’s revealed that they will “dedicate the next three months” to organizing their ideas in the studio.
The comment came in a new interview with Chancellor by Summa Inferno, in which he described their album-making process as having “a lot of stages.” As it stands now, Tool’s members reportedly “all have ideas… We’ve all shared our individual ideas with each other, and we have a really good pile of stuff.”
But it’s after the “ideas” stage that things get a little more tricky, Chancellor explained. “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.”
The band’s Latin America tour will kick off with their destination festival in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic in March, followed by dates in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Brasil (get tickets here). That places their upcoming three month period in the studio as beginning sometime around April.
“We’re gonna spend those few months really organizing our ideas,” Chancellor continued. “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.”
To that end, Chancellor defended the time the band takes to produce their music. “It’s a real delicate thing to be able to pull off,” he said. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we take a long time at all. I think that’s only natural, and that’s why I’m proud of it, because it was worked on really hard.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Chancellor also gave insight into how Tool might release this new collection of songs when they’re ready to go.
“The climate of releasing music has completely changed,” he said, before explaining that the band is open to non-traditional release strategies. “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.”
Concluding, Chancellor said, “We’re just kind of making it up. But I can tell you that we absolutely have to write new music to continue doing what we’re doing. We wouldn’t be happy just to just sit on our laurels and play the same stuff over and over again. We really want to create new music to be able to continue doing what we love. So it’s coming. Trust me.”
Tool first hinted at this new album several years ago, with Chancellor promising in 2023 that they would hit the studio after their then-upcoming arena tour. In January 2024, he told Heavy Consequence that they would begin recording the follow-up to 2019’s Fear Inoculum in the “second half” of that year, and added the next month that “there’s no thought of taking 13 years” with the new project.
Since then, of course, no new music has arrived, but the band has stayed busy. They wrapped their 2024 tour last June, and then came together again for a surprise performance at Bass Magazine Awards last month. Earlier this week, frontman Maynard James Keenan announced the passing of his father.