New Tool Album: Bassist Justin Chancellor Confirms New Double Album Rumors
There is an update on the new Tool album. The band’s bassist, Justin Chancellor, has just confirmed that the band is working on a new album and that it is “going to be awesome.”
Fans have waited for a new Tool album for 10 years now. Since the release of 2006’s critically acclaimed 10,000 Days, the band that rocked the progressive metal scene of the 90s have been relatively quite. Some of the band members, one would think, have almost retired, with their families, kids, and the wine-making. But rumors started flowing earlier this year that a new double album was in the making and was set to be released this fall. And Justin Chancellor has just confirmed these rumors. Well, sort of.
To begin with, like his fellow bandmate, frontman Maynard James Keenan, Chancellor pointed out that he doesn’t like talking about “a new Tool album”. In a recent interview with Top Guitar, the bassist told the interviewer not to ask “that question”, before yielding with a somewhat satisfactory answer saying, “Just trust me that it’s going to be awesome. It’s in the oven. It’s cooking, it’s cooking.”
The rumors of a new Tool double album have been circulating recently since a fan posted on Reddit in July, claiming that Tool would be releasing a new 2.5-hour double album titled Decem this fall, before embarking on a big national tour. The fan even posted the track-list of the new album, which included “Descending,” a song partially performed during one of the band’s recent tours.
It has been 10 years since the release of Tool’s latest album 10,000 Days. Tool fans have been desperately awaiting a fifth album ever since. Therefore, it was only natural for Tool fans, even the most cynical ones, to get excited as the rumors of a new double album appeared last week. But frontman Maynard James Keenen shrewdly had laid these rumors to rest with the following tweet.
— Maynard J Keenan (@mjkeenan) July 16, 2016
But Despite Maynard’s tweet, some fans still seemed very optimistic. They pointed out how Tool liked to mess around with the fans regarding the release of an album. And indeed, the band has done that in the past, one example being that time they posted fake track-listings before the release of Lateralus in 2001. Justin’s recent revelation will make a lot of fans happy.
During the interview with Top Guitar, Justin also spoke about his other musical project, M.T. Void, which features Peter Mohamed of Sweet Noise. Chancellor expressed his desire to work again with Peter.
“When we did that project, Peter was in America for one year or whatever, so we took the opportunity to work together. Since then, he’s been back in Poland and I wasn’t very proficient at ProTools and the internet. I’ve started to get better and I think maybe there’s a future. If we can do that more efficiently, then we can make another album that way.”
It had widely been speculated that the delay in the release of Tool’s fifth album was the result of frontman Maynard James Keenan’s frustration and indifference with the band’s followers. But in 2014, in an interview with Rolling Stone, Danny Carey and Adam Jones revealed that the actual cause of the delay was family commitments and an ongoing lawsuit.
After the lawsuit was settled in favor of the band in 2015, Jones revealed that the band was now turning their focus to recording a new album, adding that he hoped it would be released by the end of 2015. Well, it’s past mid-2016 now and Tool fans across the globe are hoping that the rumors of the double album are actually true.
Tool, formed in 1990, is one of the most successful and influential progressive rock bands of the last 25 years. The lineup has consisted of drummer Danny Carey, guitarist Adam Jones, vocalist Maynard James Keenan, and bassist Justin Chancellor since 1995, when Chancellor replaced original bassist Paul D’Amour. The band is revered by fans worldwide for their experiment with music, hypnotic lyrics, unusual time signatures, and the incorporation of amazing visual arts in their music videos and live performances. The three-time Grammy Award winners have been an inspiration to almost every major rock band since the 90s.
Whether or not Tool releases a new album this fall, some fans will get to see them live come October. Tool will be headlining the 2016 Aftershock Festival in Sacramento on October 22.
[Feature Image by Felix Marquez/AP Images]
