Way back in 2017 before Fear Inoculum, a Reddior named Josh launched a Change.org petition for Tool to remaster their back catalog and release it all on vinyl. Tool drummer Danny Carey responded to Josh in an email saying "The petition won't really matter. We are already in the process of remastering all of our albums for release on vinyl in the near future." Now it seems those remasters are coming soon.
In an interview with Rick Beato, Carey was asked what the best sounding Tool song is in his opinion. Carey replied with two songs from the Ænima remaster, which has yet to be announced. Given the way Carey talks about hearing it on vinyl, it seems like the remasters might be arriving soon?
"We just remastered Ænima the album," said Carey. "'Stinkfist' and 'Eulogy' both sound incredible on that. The low end, the way things are sit together and all that – those are two of my favorites, that stuck out. I think it might be just because I recently heard it on the 180g vinyl. I was like 'oh my God.' I forgot how good it sounded. I hadn't heard it in an analog form in ages."
I know what you're thinking – "soon" in Tool years can be a while. But if Carey actually has a test pressing of Ænima, we can't be that far off from the reissues. As for new Tool material, who knows! Tool bassist Justin Chancellor said in a recent interview with Metal Hammer that the band would prefer not to take another 13 years between records.
"Danny Carey is 62 now, so there's no thought of taking 13 years if we're gonna do it. We're gonna have to be more efficient, and we've been talking of ways that we can do that. Maybe take 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!"
Chancellor did reveal that Tool started writing in earnest, with sessions underway before their current tour. They plan to "dive back in" after wrapping up the European leg later this year.
"We put a little work in before this tour. 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.”
