New Tool Album: Band In Talks To Make Upcoming Album Available For Streaming

With the release of their first album in a decade drawing near, it has been reported that the band Tool are in talks with streaming services to make their catalog available for streaming. According to Bloomberg, sources close to the band (who have asked to remain unidentified) said that the band were in talks with Spotify and Apple to make their songs available for streaming.

Tool are among the last big-name artists that are still unavailable on most streaming services. If the news does turns out to be true, Tool would join the likes of the Beatles and Prince, who have only recently put their music up for streaming, thus finally accepting the shift in the music industry. Fans could very well expect the Prog Metal giants’ new album to be available for streaming.

So the stage is finally beginning to look set for the release of Tool’s fabled fifth album. Last week, the band announced a series of North American tour dates, starting on May 24. And earlier this month, it was announced that Maynard James Keenan was currently in the process of recording the vocals for the new album. The band’s near-mythical fifth studio album is rumored to be released sometime later this year. Fans started got excited last month when it was announced that Tool would be headlining this year’s New York’s Governor’s Ball Festival (June 4). This is to be their first New York show in 11 years. Coincidentally, it has also been 11 years since they last released an album. There last album 10,000 days came out in 2006.

Rumors of a new double album have been floating around since last year. Frontman Maynard James Keenen’s initial reaction to these rumors was to shrewdly lay them to rest with a tweet calling the rumors “dumb.” But despite Maynard’s tweet, some fans still seemed very optimistic. Revelations from Justin Chancellor, Danny Carey, and Adam Jones confirming the new album had given them reason to do so. And besides, they pointed out how Tool enjoyed messing around with the fans regarding the release of a new album. And indeed, the band has done that in the past, one example being that time they posted fake track listings before the release of Lateralus in 2001.

Earlier in December, bassist Justin Chancellor addressed the delay of the new album in an interview with Bass Player. While Justin seemed somewhat irritated by the repeated questions about the new album, which has somewhat become characteristic of Tool, he did seem to empathize with the fans’ impatience.

“We’ve narrowed things down to big groups of ideas. For the past few months we’ve been working on one of the newer songs fairly exclusively. We get the gist of it and find the main themes that make up the skeleton between verses and choruses.

“Everyone knows we take our time.

“All I can say is that we’ll go back Monday and do our best to finish it for you.”

It had widely been speculated that the delay in the release of Tool’s sixth album was the result of frontman Maynard James Keenan’s frustration and indifference with the band’s followers. But in 2014, in an interview with Rolling Stone, Danny Carey and Adam Jones revealed that the actual cause of the delay was family commitments and an ongoing lawsuit. After the lawsuit had been settled in favor of the band in 2015, Jones revealed that the band was now turning their focus to recording a new album, adding that he hoped it would be released by the end of 2015. Well, its 2017 now, and the new album finally seems to be in sights.

[Featured Image by John Shearer/AP Images]