Metal Anarchy

During a recent interview with NME, Tool bassist Justin Chancellor addressed the band’s plans for new music once again. According to him, “there’s more of a necessity to get something cooking a little faster.”

Chancellor said the following:

“We’re just getting old, so it’s the pressure of time. Danny [Carey, drummer] has just turned 63, so if we take 13 more years we’ll be touring when we’re over 70! Now there’s more of a necessity to get something cooking a little faster if we want to keep going strong.

We can always carry on touring, and it’s always enjoyable playing the old stuff — especially for me because I’m the new guy in the line-up… even though it’s been nearly 30 years now — but at this point we’re all eager to create something new while we’re on the planet. We want to keep producing more and really explore the creative side of ourselves. We are happy with what we’ve done so far, but we are also excited to see what else we could create that would be different from all of that.”

He continued when asked if he faces any outside pressure:

“It definitely comes on our own terms. The only pressure comes when we announce that we’re working on something new, because then we have to make our own predictions for when it’ll come out, and obviously you feel like you let people down if you don’t release it in a certain amount of time.

It’s a nice feeling that people still want new stuff, but also they’ve got to understand that it’s not the easiest thing to do. It’s not a simple thing and it’s not always a natural thing that comes at the time you want it to come. Art is a very strange animal and it has its own schedule.

When it comes to writing new music, we’re aware that people don’t manage to stay together for as long as we have, so the pure fact that we’ve made it this far makes us eager to take it to the next place and create something new. Whether we’ll be able to successfully, who knows? We’re pretty sure we can, but Tool’s approach has always been experimental, so we never quite know how it’ll come together.”

He also added the following when asked if the band would be open to releasing a new EP:

“Absolutely. Looking at how things are released and consumed by the public these days, it’s more common to release even just a single. That’d be an interesting approach for us because we’ve always waited until we’ve created a whole body of work and made it polished and refined and perfect.

So it’d be an exciting idea to go ‘Well, every time we finish a song, we could just record that and release it’. That being said, the way that we like to do stuff is to present a whole package with the art and with a theme to it… so an EP would be a good compromise between an album and a single. To get a couple of really juicy tracks together and release them on a shorter version of an album.

Another idea is to release singles one at a time, then once they’re all once we’ve accumulated to the length of an album we’ll put that together in a package and release it as an album. That way you could still have a physical vinyl and do all the artwork and all that stuff.

I still think that by writing a whole album, you get really deep into the vibe of the piece and it turns into something further reaching and makes your work a little deeper. But for now, it’s pretty flexible, which is exciting. As soon as we’ve got something ready to go, there’s a choice of different outlets.”