Oh shit.
It’s been a long, long time coming, but the title track from Tool‘s forthcoming fifth studio album Fear Inoculum – and the first new recording from the progressive metal legends in 13 years – is finally available for streaming and download. Yesterday the band revealed the album art for Fear Inoculum and promised its title track would be available today, and here it is.
Details on the forthcoming album remain relatively meagre, but we’ve learned it’s a whopping 85 minutes long, making it the longest Tool album to be released. Once again, the band chose to produce the record themselves, while Joe Barresi returned to handle engineering and mixing duties (Barresi worked with Tool on previous album 10,000 Days back in 2006.)
If it feels like there’s a lot going on in the Tool universe right now, that’s because there is. This news comes after the four-piece made their back catalogue of classic albums like AEnima and Lateralus available on digital providers for the first time ever. The band, once one of rock’s biggest hold-outs as far as streaming platforms were concerned, racked up around 20 million streams within 48 hours of being released to the world. 2001’s Lateralus went on to score the most download album spot on iTunes.
Back in May, the band debuted two Fear Inoculum tracks – entitled ‘Descending’ and ‘Invincible’ – live at their headline performance at the Welcome to Rockville festival in Jacksonville, Florida.
Stream the title track from ‘Fear Inoculum’ below. Fear Inoculum is set for release on Friday, 30th August, and pre-orders are up now.