It exists. Though it still seems somewhat surreal to say it, it’s true. After all the purgatorial years of waiting, all the inherited hype from countless memes, GIFs, rumours, whispers, updates and false dawns… on August 30, 2019, the world finally heard Tool’s near-mythological fifth album, Fear Inoculum. What’s interesting now is that, a few months on – and even for those who’ve committed the record’s myriad twists and turns to memory – it still feels both brand new and yet somehow strangely elusive. This is not an accident. Despite the pervading narrative that it took Tool 13 years to make – which always included the derp-brained assumption that they started recording a new album the very second that they had released 2006’s 10,000 Days – Fear Inoculum is, nonetheless, a product of...
