In a recent interview with Metal Hammer, Tool bassist Justin Chancellor offered a glimmer of hope to fans who have patiently awaited new material, indicating that they won’t have to endure another 13-year hiatus between albums. Chancellor disclosed that Tool have already embarked on the initial stages of composing music for 2019’s Fear Inoculum. He revealed that during a break from their European tour, the band plans to fully immerse themselves in the creative process, dedicating the latter half of the year to focusing on new music. 

Chancellor explained:

“Danny [Carey, TOOL drummer] is 62 now, so there’s no thought of taking 13 years if we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna have to be more efficient, and we’ve been talking of ways that we can do that. Maybe taking a leaf out of how me and Peter [Mohamed, Justin’s bandmate in side project Mtvoid] work with Mtvoid — instead of staring at each other going ‘Come on! Get it out of ya!’ maybe we could do a bit more at home. We’ll see!”

On working on new music, Chancellor stated:

“We put a little work in before this tour. We gave it a stab for a couple of months. We ended up compiling all the ideas we had; normally when we do that we start writing pretty soon after, but we had a lot of stuff coming up, so we didn’t dive all the way in. When we’re done with Europe, we’re gonna dive back in during the second half of the year.”