Bad News On The New Tool Album By Bassist Justin Chancellor

Tool bassist Justin Chancellor has hinted that the band isn’t going to release their album this year. Speaking with OG Weekly, the bassist announced that they are set to release the new album at “some year in the future.”

Chancellor was discussing the band’s upcoming show in San Bernardino, which he said would be the band’s biggest show of the whole tour. The event will take place this Saturday at the San Manuel Amphitheater in San Bernardino. The question regarding the band’s new album was inevitably brought up and Chancellor replied saying that it will be released at “some year in the future.”

Tool’s near-mythical fifth studio album was widely rumored to be released sometime later this year. In March, it was announced that Maynard James Keenan was currently in the process of recording the vocals for the new album. However, the frontman later said in an interview that there could be yet more delay on the release of the new album, suggesting that it had hit a roadblock.

Rumors of a new Tool 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.” However, 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. 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. He had been accused of calling his own fans “insufferable retards,” an accusation he recently clarified.

“Our core fanbase aren’t fanatics. They’re music lovers, artists and good people. It’s the fanatics that are insufferable.”

The band has repeatedly played a new song titled “Descending” during their recent shows.

[Featured Image by Paul A. Hebert/AP Images]