The releases of Metallica’s Black Album and Nirvana’s Nevermind decimated the Western alt-music landscape like a nuclear bomb in 1991. In the wake of those two chart-dominating albums, the traditional values of hard rock (bravado, anger and ever-intensifying music) were deemed passé, and groove and vulnerability became the genre’s new must-hear sounds. It’s this context that helped give rise to one of the greatest bands in progressive metal: Tool.
Tool could not have been further removed from the glam dick-swinging or thrash fury that dominated the 1980s. Instead, on their 1993 debut Undertow, the Californian quartet mixed an introspective, mid-paced and cerebral alt-metal cocktail. The album’s first single, Sober, condensed that thinking man’s angst into a tight, anthemic form. Buoyed by drummer Danny Carey, guitarist Adam Jones and bassist Paul D’Amour’s technical precision and frontman Maynard James Keenan’s immaculate wails, it lifted Tool to chart success and started their climb to arena-cramming supremacy.
