Tool took 13 years to follow up 2006’s 10,000 Days with 2019’s Fear Inoculum, but bassist Justin Chancellor assures fans that the next album won’t take nearly as long.
“[Drummer] Danny [Carey] is 62 now, so there’s no thought of taking 13 years if we’re gonna do it,” Chancellor told Metal Hammer in a new interview. “We’re gonna have to be more efficient, and we’ve been talking of ways that we can do that.”
The bassist went on to mention his side project MTVoid with vocalist Peter Mohamed, saying, “Maybe taking a leaf out of how me and Peter work with MTVoid – instead of staring at each other going ‘Come on, get it out of ya,’ maybe we could do a bit more at home. We’ll see.”
Tool are currently winding down a winter US tour (tickets available here), with a European run to follow from late May to late June, but Chancellor says the band already has a leg up on some new material. “We put a little work in before this tour,” he continued. “We gave it a stab for a couple of months. We ended up compiling all the ideas we had; normally when we do that we start writing pretty soon after, but we had a lot of stuff coming up, so we didn’t dive all the way in. When we’re done with Europe, we’re gonna dive back in during the second half of the year.”
That timeline corresponds with what Chancellor relayed to Heavy Consequence in a recent interview, telling us, “I’d say by June we’re going to be back home after Europe, and the second half of the year we’re going to get in and give it another go to try and put some of it together. We’re not going to be taking so much time over it if we’re going to do an album. We’re going to figure out how to do it a little bit quicker.”
It’s been almost five years since the release of Fear Inoculum, and another eight years would put Carey at 70 years old. Singer Maynard James Keenan turns 60 in April, a milestone he’s celebrating with the “Sessanta” tour, which will find his bands A Perfect Circle and Puscifer sharing the stage with Primus this spring. Tickets for that outing are available here.
See our photo gallery of Tool’s recent tour stop at New York City’s Madison Square Garden below.
Photo Gallery: Tool and Elder play Madison Square Garden in New York City (click to expand and scroll through):
