The wait for the follow-up to Tool's 10,000 Days was the stuff of meme legend, but while speaking with Cleveland Scene recently, drummer Danny Carey revealed that he doesn't expect the follow-up to Fear Inoculum to take anywhere near the 13-year wait its predecessor did.
“It was frustrating not having new material to play, but that time really flew by quickly,” he says. “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," says of the sessions for their most recent album.
That said, Carey continues, "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.”
In addition, Tool have remained consistently in the spotlight since Fear Inoculum's 2019 release, and part of that has been revisiting some of their past catalog. The band just issued an updated version of their 1992 song "Opiate" dubbed "Opiate2" that fleshes out the track a little bit more.
“On tour, we’re not doing the full version of ‘Opiate2’ we just released because it’s really long,” says Carey. “And we want to give people more songs. We pulled out certain elements of it. [The new version] is more centered around the video. It’s almost like we edited the song to the picture. It has a twist to it. It has a little more improv going on in the middle. It’s a lot of fun to play. It has a little more energy. There is more electronic improvisation in the middle, but the basic framework is still there. We wanted to update it a bit."
Fans can also be on the lookout for a new live DVD that's in the works that is mostly from from their Lateralus tour in 2002. And Tool have set an April 8 release date for the ultra deluxe Fear Inoculum vinyl box set Pre-orders for that set can be found here.
Tool will wrap up the current leg of their North American tour over the next week, with a little time off before they start up again in Copenhagen, Denmark on April 23 for their European trek. See all of their scheduled dates and get ticketing info right here.
