Tool may very well be working on new music, or at least that's what bassist Justin Chancellor seems to be implying.
Chancellor posted a photo of his two basses in cases on Instagram with the caption "Vacation is over…" earlier today, which all by itself seems to mean nothing. Until you remember that Chancellor told Metal Hammer earlier this year that Tool would resume working on new music when they wrapped up their European live dates. Those ended on June 27 and y'know, here we are.
"We put a little work in before this tour," said Chancellor at the time. "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.”
Chancellor commented on the progress of new Tool a few months later in an interview with Kerrang!, noting the band has some skeletons of some songs waiting to be finished.
"There's absolutely tons and tons of hard drives full of stuff," said Chancellor. "Some ideas go back to before Fear Inoculum that are just simple riffs that we never incorporated into a song. But sometimes that's a bit like grinding the gears when you're trying to resurrect or revisit them, so it's really appealing to work on the newest stuff. Each time we come together, people also have so many new ideas and then we'll spend all day playing them.
"We're constantly introducing new stuff but then sometimes that'll marry with the old material. We've been writing for the last couple of weeks, meeting a couple of times each week – we've had some really good sessions, and a lot of it has been brand new. We already have a couple of solid, what I would say are, skeletons of songs waiting to be finalised."
Alongside the new material is the possibility of new vinyl reissues, as Tool drummer Danny Carey brought up earlier this year. But you know how it goes in the world of Tool – these things take time.
