JUSTIN CHANCELLOR On New TOOL: “We Have A Couple Of Solid Skeletons Of Songs Waiting To Be Finalized”

Tool has pretty vocal about new material lately. Vocalist Maynard James Keenan commented that the band can’t take another 14 years to make another record, while drummer Danny Carey wouldn’t mind mixing things up a bit.

Now in a new interview with Kerrang!, bassist Justin Chancellor commented that Tool is legitimately working on the follow-up to Fear Inoculum. Chancellor noted that Tool has some skeletons of some songs waiting to be finished, and that the band plans to continue working both on and off tour.

“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.”

On their writing process, Chancellor commented that Tool is trying to change up their process a little bit: “We’re doing what we can to try and give a fresh approach to the writing experience, and part of that is trying not to overdo it so we’re not banging our heads against the wall.”

Now if we could just get those vinyl reissues sometime soon, we’d be all set.