Tool‘s Maynard James Keenan and Adam Jones have shared an update on any potential new material from the group.
Speaking to Loudwire on the Loudwire Nights podcast, the pair discussed all things Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, and potential new plans for Tool.
When asked what they have in store for next year, Keenan offered, “Writing, I guess. You guys are busy, Adam?”
Jones agreed and said, “We want to get another record out and play, do what we do. The three of us have been jamming. I don’t know if you go, oh, the writing process has started. It’s always there. Between preparing for an upcoming tour or whatever we’re doing, there’s points where someone goes, oh, I got this and I got this. But I think we’re going to dive deep soon.”
Jones said at one point he was playing a riff, and Keenan said it sounded like Black Sabbath. He said, “I’ll probably bug those guys again about trying to turn that into a future Tool song. I’ve got lots of riffs, we put them together, tear them apart and try to make something that we’re all into.”
Elsewhere in the podcast episode, Tool also discussed their feelings around the death of Ozzy Osbourne.
“It was very devastating,” Jones said. He shared that as a kid he remembered the older kids playing Black Sabbath while they were skateboarding, and it feeling surreal when he got asked to play OzzFest and get to know the Osbourne family.
Tool performed at Black Sabbath’s ‘Back To The Beginning’ show in Birmingham in July. They played a cover of the 1970 Black Sabbath hit ‘Hand Of Doom’, taken from their album ‘Paranoid’.
It came after Tool’s drummer Danny Carey participated in a drum circle with Mastodon’s Brann Dailor, Slipknot’s Eloy Casagrande and Gojiras’s Mario Duplantier during Mastodon’s cover of ‘Supernaut’. Carey and bandmate Adam Jones also played in a Billy Corgan-fronted supergroup alongside Tom Morello, K.K. Downing, and Rudy Sarzo.
On the podcast, Jones said: “At the same time, it was kind of this gut feeling of harmony, that we had been a part of sending him off and so there was a little bit of … I don’t know. Sorry, it’s still kind of emotional, the whole legacy and how it affected each one of us. They’ve been nothing but cool and supportive of our band.”
Speaking about what it was like to cover ‘Hand Of Doom’, Keenan said: “I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time. It took Ozzy almost dying for me to get these guys to do it.”
Last year, Tool’s Justin Chancellor spoke to NME about fans’ fanaticism with the band, whether new material could arrive as a series of singles, and if they have plans to embark on some intimate club shows.
When asked about whether he feels the band are under pressure to create new material, and if they do their creative process on their own terms, he said: “It definitely comes on our own terms. The only pressure comes when we announce that we’re working on something new, because then we have to make our own predictions for when it’ll come out, and obviously you feel like you let people down if you don’t release it in a certain amount of time.
“It’s a nice feeling that people still want new stuff, but also they’ve got to understand that it’s not the easiest thing to do. It’s not a simple thing and it’s not always a natural thing that comes at the time you want it to come. Art is a very strange animal and it has its own schedule.
“When it comes to writing new music, we’re aware that people don’t manage to stay together for as long as we have, so the pure fact that we’ve made it this far makes us eager to take it to the next place and create something new. Whether we’ll be able to successfully, who knows? We’re pretty sure we can, but Tool’s approach has always been experimental, so we never quite know how it’ll come together.”