Music

Tool’s First Single In 13 Years Is A Shot Of Immense Melodic Horror

'Fear Inoculum' is a surprisingly contemporary breath of sick, bubonic air.

by Joseph Earp  8 August 2019
Tool

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Few bands feel as closely intertwined with the culture they dominated as Tool.

The act’s blend of paranoid, nervy progressive metal was the perfect fit for the ’90s, an era in which the maximalism of the ’80s had started to sour and go rank. It was a decade of relative excess — remember growing up in a civilisation that felt like it might never collapse? — but an excess that people had grown tired and suspicious of.

We knew things were booming, but we’d gotten used to that boom-bust cycle, and were well aware that a crash couldn’t be far off. Hence the blockbusters of that decade: big, high-budget nightmares about doom and dystopia like Jurassic Park, The Matrix, and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. And hence the first two Tool records, Undertow and Aenima, the latter of which is dominated by a song that prays, over and over again, that Los Angeles might sink into the ocean.

So then, the big question: sure Tool’s big slabs of paranoia made sense in the ’90 and early thousands, but do they have a place in our darker, considerably bleaker 2019?

The answer, surprisingly, seems to be yes. Sure, ‘Fear Inoculum’, the first single off their forthcoming album of the same name, might be gilded with the kind of melodic flourishes that we as a musical culture left behind shortly after Bush got re-elected. And sure, lyrics like “now, contagion I exhale you” might be as cutting-edge and contemporary as a Beyblade.

But the song’s twisty, colourful cruelty is the perfect sonic antidote to an era that sews ennui just as it sews destruction. Sure, everything’s doomed, but a song like ‘Fear Inoculum’ reminds you that you might as well get off your ass and play your fiddle — or, at least, your bass — while Rome burns.

It’s too early to make a call on the rest of the album — in true Tool style, the seven-track record is set to span 85 minutes, so it’s always possible that the project could buckle under the weight of its own arch anarchy. But at this stage, despite the odds, the band of Iraq war trauma and Limewire-addled paranoia have made one of the most urgent rock songs of the year.