It’s always been a long stretch between Tool albums, you’d assume it would take considerable time and effort to craft prog metal masterpieces like Ænima and Lateralus but complex composition is not really the chief reason behind the growing eight year delay between Tool’s fabled new album.
The real reason the follow-up to 2006’s 10,000 Days is taking so long is something far more banal. As one half of the band disclose in a revealing new interview, there’s something far more complex than polyrhythmic riffs and mind-bending song structures bogging the band down: a multi-levelled lawsuits.
Essentially, a legal nightmare of lawsuits and countersuits are holding Tool back from releasing a new album in a long-winding trail of copyright and insurance claims that would be comical if it wasn’t de-railing the band’s creative output and personal lives.
“The fans are all going, ‘We want a new Tool album. What the fuck?’ And you don’t want to pull people into your problems, because they don’t understand.”“The whole thing is really depressing,” drummer Danny Carey tells Rolling Stone. “The bad thing is it’s really time consuming. As we’ve gotten older and our priorities have changed, it’s hard to get the band on a good, solid schedule as it is. People have kids now. And there’s lots of other things that pop up. To throw this into the mix, it makes everything that much worse and stresses people out.”
The tangled legal web stems from an incident in 2007 when a friend of guitarist Adam Jones wanted due credit for artwork he’d provided to the band. Things got complicated further when an insurance company Tool had hired to defend them turned around and sued the group “over technicalities” regarding the case. Tool then filed a countersuit in defence against the claims.
Seven years on, they’re still mired in litigation with the case now set to go to trial in January 2015, the costs of which are severely affecting the prog metal pioneers.
Jones explains: “it’s costing millions and millions and millions of dollars to defend us. And the fans are all going, ‘We want a new Tool album. What the fuck?’ And you don’t want to pull people into your problems, because they don’t understand.”
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The guitarist says the band are “fighting the good fight” but that “every time we’ve gotten close to going to trail, it gets postponed and we’ve wasted money and time and it has just drained our creative energy.
“I find it so hard to be creative when you have something awful nagging at you, just stuck between the hemispheres of your brain and affecting your sleep and your relationship with other band members,” Jones says. “We have such a strong creative freedom in this band. It’s like we’ve been in a war – and it’s unnecessary. It’s just a shame.
The good news is that the band have one track “pretty much done,” a 10 minute epic that “goes through lots of changes and it’s got really heavy elements.” Carey and Jones explain to Rolling Stone explain the new material has “some good nose-bleeding riffs happening” and is a “little more ‘metal’ sounding,” even experimenting with synth and percussive textures but with Tool’s trademark “crazy, hard-prog element[s].”
The bad news is that it’s still a long way from completion, with vocalist Maynard James Keenan still yet to lend his visionary lyrics and singing to any material – let alone hitting the studio to record their fifth album in more than 20 years.
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“I’m hoping that we have something really solid recorded by the end of the year,” Carey says. “But we’ll see how it goes. I thought that last year, too… But we’re making great progress. We’ve really knocked out a lot of good things, especially over the last month. We’re all excited about it.”
Jones adds that, regardless of the legal red tape choking them, the process will take as long as it takes to achieve the quality expected of them. “We’re just not going to settle for doing anything but our best work, and the fans appreciate that.”
