We picked the heaviest songs and did this, like, teaser record.”Ģ. That’s the money side of the fence, so there’s a different perspective. “Someone at the label was like, ‘You guys gotta put out your heaviest stuff! That’s how you’re gonna get noticed!’ It took us a long time to figure out how politics work at a record company. “At the time we did Opiate, we had probably about half the songs from Undertow written,” Jones told Revolver in 2013. Two Undertow songs, “Sober” and “Crawl Away,” appeared in early versions on a limited-edition 1991 demo tape called 72826 and according to the band, there were other future Undertow songs that were left off of Opiate at the behest of the record company. Maynard James Keenan and Adam Jones began writing songs together in 1987, and had thus amassed a substantial amount of material by the time Tool signed with Zoo Entertainment in 1992. Many of Undertow ‘s songs had already been written by the time Tool recorded the Opiate EP. In honor of the album’s 25th anniversary, here are 10 things you might not know about Tool’s Undertow.ġ. “He said, ‘I like my steak without fat I like to trim the fat off.’ We told him, ‘Fuck you, man, you’re not touching any of our songs!’ He wanted to take little parts out of each song and make them follow the formula of what sells. “The guy who mixed our album … wanted to cut up our songs,” Jones told Guitar School in 1994. But the album’s creation wasn’t without its struggles, as Jones, frontman Maynard James Keenan, drummer Danny Carey and bassist Paul D’Amour often had to fight to maintain their uncompromising vision. Recorded in the fall of 1992 at Sound City in Van Nuys, California, and at Hollywood’s Grandmaster Recorders, and co-produced by the band with Sylvia Massy, Undertow came together much more quickly than any Tool album ever would again.
“We’re not a metal band, a grunge band, a rock band or a country band. “Our tastes run through Joni Mitchell, King Crimson, Depeche Mode and country,” guitarist Adam Jones told Guitar World in September 1993. The album’s success firmly established Tool as a potent creative force, and helped pave the way for a new wave of progressive metal, even though the band members themselves resolutely refused to let themselves be pigeonholed into any genre. Despite its challenging material and the band’s insistence on letting their music (and intense live performances) do the talking, Undertow rose all the way to Number One on Billboard’s Top Heatseekers charts, peaking at Number 50 on the Billboard 200 and eventually selling more than 2 million copies in the U.S. Tool‘s first album sounded like nothing else at the time. Dark, mysterious, angry, complex, meticulously crafted and loaded with oddly amorphous song structures, 1993’s Undertow confounded both music critics (many of whom tried to lump the band in with the then-popular grunge movement) and early Tool fans who’d been attracted to the more aggressive, metallic sounds of ’92’s Opiate EP, the band’s first official release.Īnd yet, the album – and the disturbing stop-motion videos for its songs “Sober” and “Prison Sex” – clearly touched a nerve with the American public.
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