Those of you who read the recent Tool newsletter might have realised I’ve been away for the last week in Tasmania at a caving conference. It was great! What was also great was a few tweets from Maynard, the most interesting of which confirms that his vocals have been recorded
Someone also asked if we should expect a surprise release:
I don’t think anyone should really be surprised with that response. It was always an unlikely fantasy that Tool were going to drop a surprise album in my opinion.
Finally when asked about the process:
Of course many online took this to believe that Maynard hates Tool, and all they stand for. My take is more that Maynard has expressed these kind of frustrations since Lateralus days, so it’s nothing new. I’m sure if he felt the end result wasn’t worth the “slow death” he would have pulled the pin on his involvement long ago.
All in all, the good news here is that we can probably assume that we’ll see the new album around about the same time they kick off touring in May.
Looking back into 10,000 Days history, the album title was released on March 3rd 2006. We didn’t hear about the release date until a few days after that (which you may recall was the 6th of May). Assuming that the new album is tracking on a similar time line (and I suspect an April/May release seems likely) it may be a few months until we get some more solid details.