(And possibly even pretentious people.) But the more Tool fans I met the more wrong I felt about that assumption. (Ideas basically proven by using Alex Grey's art on their album covers and drummer Danny Carey's admitted occultist leanings.) Also, this was a time when we barely had the internet (!) so most of these revelations were passed on from person-to-person, which just served to heighten the band's mystique.īecause of all of this, I'd always thought that Tool was for smart, thoughtful people. Even in 1996 there were already rumors that the members of Tool were into exploring psychedelic realms and sacred geometry. The lyrics were dense and you could spend hours unraveling and attempting to decode the possible meanings behind some phrasings. There's a bunch to talk about when it comes to Tool, really. I thought the other 90s “boy music” that they liked was mostly okay (Deftones were cool but I had no love for Korn) but we didn't talk about those bands nearly as much: it was always Tool, Tool, Tool. The Basement Boys fancied themselves quite the teenage intellectuals and they'd sit for hours and debate the merits of an album, a song or a drum solo.

I thought that some parts of the Undertow album were alright, but that all of Ænima was awesome. My group of dude friends (now grown men who I still affectionately refer to as “The Basement Boys” because we always seemed to be hanging out in someone's unfinished suburban basement) introduced me to Tool right before the release of Ænima in 1996. As a teenager in the '90s, my favorite albums were by Nirvana, Elastica, Otis Redding, Echo & the Bunnymen and, weirdly, Tool.

Tool aenima album art