Tool bassist Justin Chancellor said that the band’s fans won’t have to wait another 13 years for a new album. Appearing in an interview for KLOS-FM with host Matt Pinfield, Chancellor gave some insight into where things are now regarding potential new material and a follow-up record to 2019’s “Fear Inoculum.”
“We’ve actually had a stab at getting some ideas going again,” the bassist reveals (transcript via Ultimate Guitar). “We’re constantly coming up with new stuff as well. So that’s always exciting. When you’ve got a fresh idea, you’re as excited to play it to the other guys.”
Apart from having new, fresh ideas, Justin also added that there’s a lot of stuff they came up with for previous albums but that they haven’t used yet. He added:
“But there is definitely a pile of goodies that we didn’t use for the last one and that, perhaps, we didn’t use for the one before that. We have some really old stuff that we’ve never used. Often, it’s little pieces.”
“And the cool thing about that is you carry them all the way through,” Justin said. “And at some point, they connect with something else.”
Although bits and pieces, he explains that these parts can find their place in a new song if they fit a new song idea that they have. As he adds:
“It might take coming up with a whole new idea to find a home for this old riff or rhythm that we had, that we’d never been able to kind of find the home for. So that’s kind of the way it all comes together.”
“It’s like a combination of using all those old things, and then coming up with new stuff all the time as well and just to keep hitting it with the new stuff and see what sticks.”
As of this moment, Justin, Danny, Adam, and Maynard are busy preparing for upcoming tour dates. There are a bunch of dates, both in the US and Europe, that they planned for 2024.
“We’re busy, but I’m sure by next year and by the time we’re done touring, we’re going to be hungry to get out this new stuff,” Justin continued.
It’s no secret that Tool have become so famous for the 13-year gap between “10,000 Days” and “Fear Inoculum.” But, with a laugh, Justin said that he was sure that they were not going to wait that long for another record. He concluded by offering:
“Being that we’re all moving on in years a bit, we’re not going to be taking that long again, you know what I mean? When we do get back out of it, we’re going to try to try and kick along a bit quicker.”
What Justin said here in this recent interview is in line with what Tool drummer Danny Carey said in 2022. In a way, Danny feels like this large gap has good and bad sides. At the same time, he’s certain that the next one won’t take as much time.
“It was frustrating not having new material to play, but that time really flew by quickly,” Danny said. “I guess that’s just the nature of life.”
“It’s like when you have kids, and they’re grown up, and you go, ‘What happened?’ It took a long time, but we did a lot of touring and tried to grow in different ways and take a break from each other to keep things fresh.”
“We also wanted to bring in outside influences so we would have something new to say to each other musically. It all came together really well on this one. I’m sure it won’t take us this long for the next one. We even had some stuff left over from the last one that we’ll develop. We have head starts on three or four new songs.”
And in another interview from this year, Chancellor also reflected on how incredibly tiresome and “labored” the process of a new Tool album can get:
“After those early years when we were a new band, it’s a little easier. Stuff comes a little more naturally when you’re writing music. And obviously, it’s gotten famously labored, our creative process.”
“Adam [Jones] has bunch of ideas, we keep it very simple. We try not to over-develop our own ideas, when we bring them in for Tool, so that we can present them as a building block, and then bounce it off each other. And then, we just learn each other’s stuff, and start playing around with it.”
“Some days, at the beginning of the process, we’ll play for hours on one riff, and it’s really enjoyable, and then it can get to a point where it’s really [not] enjoyable [laughs], like a week.”
“We do record everything while we’re doing this. Being that we all live in LA, there’s a lot of traffic driving home, so we would make CDs every day, sit in the car and carry on working basically. I’d listen to it all the way home. That way, you’re absorbing everything, listening to what you did from a different perspective from when you’re actually performing it.
“And then [we] come in the next day with some ideas that stood out. But yeah, you can find stuff from bouncing around like that, but often there’s a lot of worth in the pure, original idea.”
Photos: Lugnuts (Tool live Birmingham 2022)
