It's almost unfathomable to think we are less than a month away from a new album from Tool. The band have confirmed that Fear Inoculum will be released August 30th. Yesterday, we saw what the cover would look like. Snippets from guitarist Adam Jones' interview in Guitar World also surfaced, and we learned the new album is focused around the number seven and that the songs were long.
Update: Listen to the first new Tool song in 13 years right here.
Tool are the cover stars of the new issue of Revolver, and while the issue hits stands next week, subscribers got the issue in the mail yesterday and there is a huge 20-page spread about the band with a great interview conducted by writer J. Bennett.
Perhaps the most revealing part of the interview is frontman Maynard James Kennan actually went into detail about the theme of the album. The title, of course, alludes to accepting your fears or being immersed in them, to overcome them.
Maynard explains "I feel like this is [about] wisdom through age, through experience. Hopefully through aging you find wisdom in some of the things you've encountered. Learning from your mistakes, learning from your successes. So if anything is a broad stroke of this album, it would be embracing where we are right now, acknowledging where we've come from and some of the things we've grown through."
Adam Jones echoed the sentiment adding "Things like, 'I'm gonna wear socks with sandals. I don't give a fuck what people think, I'm just gonna be comfortable.' [laughs] So it's about the little things in life. It's making those choices and moving on and growing. There's a little bit of Frank Herbert's Dune in that, so I'm into it. I'm so excited for this new record. The songs are very long but they are like movements. It's like two or three songs in one, but they relate. They flow. So I don't know. We'll see how it goes. But I am ecstatic.
All the songs on the record are long and Danny Carey says "They pretty much ended up that way. There were times when I thought, 'Ok, this is getting kind of ridiculous.' [Laughs] I was a bit worried about it because I kinda like the contrast of having short songs and long songs, but all of them ended up being really long. So I had to step back and go, 'If this is where we are as a band and this is where we're meeting, I just have to accept it.' I try to look at it as movements within an individual song and the overall piece is a symphony or something. As long as it's moving forward and progressing and keeping people's attention, I'm not too worried about the length.
Tool promise a new song and pre-order info for the album tomorrow, so make sure to come back here in the morning and we'll post all the info. Update: Listen to the first new Tool song in 13 years right here.
Read the full interview in the new issue of Revolver, which you can order here.
