Tool’s Justin Chancellor Provides Update on New Music: “It’s Coming. Trust Me.”

As fans mark six years since Tool’s last album, the wait for new material drags on—but there may be some light at the end of the tunnel. While hopes of avoiding another 13-year drought have waned in recent months, bassist Justin Chancellor has remained vocal about the band’s efforts to write new material.

In May 2024, Chancellor revealed that the group had hard drives full of song ideas and had already begun the writing process. However, with various band members busy with other projects—including their upcoming Latin American tour and Maynard James Keenan’s commitments with A Perfect Circle and Puscifer—progress has been slow.

Now, in a new interview with Summa Inferno, Chancellor has offered fresh insight, stating that once Tool wraps up their South American tour in March, they intend to dedicate three months to developing new music in the studio:

“We have already shared with each other a lot of these new ideas, but when we get back, we’re actually gonna dedicate the next three months after that in the studio to organizing our ideas.

There’s a lot of stages in the process… The really difficult process is when you actually get together and make decisions about how it’s going to end up. And that becomes a little more mathematical, a little more like in the classroom—there’s a blackboard and there’s numbers and you have to make decisions.

…It’s like a pregnancy almost. When you go to the studio, you have to make this final decision of how it’s gonna sound and how you’re gonna play it, and it’s gonna live like that forever. So it’s a real delicate thing to be able to pull off. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we take a long time at all. I think that’s only natural, and that’s why I’m proud of it, because it was worked on really hard.”

Chancellor also addressed the possibility of releasing singles or an EP rather than a full-length album, citing the changing landscape of the music industry:

“We’ve talked about releasing a single, just one song—we could do that. We could also release an EP. And I think because we have such a dedicated fan base, everyone’s gonna be up for it… We talked about the option of just maybe doing it a little differently and doing a song at a time.

Or you could release a single and then another single, another single, and then after a year of releasing singles, you could put them all together on a record and make that an album.”

While he stopped short of confirming an exact timeline, Chancellor reassured fans that new music is indeed on the way:

“We absolutely have to write new music to continue doing what we’re doing. We wouldn’t be happy just to sit on our laurels and play the same stuff over and over again. We really want to create new music to be able to continue doing what we love. So it’s coming. Trust me.”

When asked if he and his bandmates feel external pressure when crafting new material, Chancellor admitted that the real challenge comes from within:

“It’s more of a pressure on ourselves to be proud of what we allow to go out into the world. And part of that is really working hard on it and creating something that you’re proud of, not kind of being flippant about it, really taking it seriously as an art form.

…It’s art. Each to their own. And if you try to please everybody, it’s not gonna work. So you really just have to be true to yourself.”

While it remains to be seen whether fans will hear new Tool music within the next two years, Chancellor’s comments suggest that serious steps are finally being taken. Whether it arrives as a full-length album or a series of singles, it’s clear that something is brewing within the band’s creative ranks.

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