Tool has been working on their new album for what seems like an eternity, and while we’ve had several vague updates from Maynard James Keenan, Justin Chancellor gave Bass Player a real update over the weekend. Here’s what Justin had to say: “We’re pretty deep into the writing process now, and we’ve narrowed things down to big groups of ideas. For the past few months we’ve been working on one of the newer songs fairly exclusively. We get the gist of it and find the main themes that make up the skeleton between verses and choruses.Then we explore different ways we can depart from that and come back to it and flip it upside down, and take the time to see what else is there. Everyone knows we take our time. We’re really trying to be responsible with ourselves in trying to discover ideas that haven’t been discovered before. It’s kind of an alchemy, how we experiment. We’re our own worst critics; we’re doing our best to find something that blows us all away, and we want each other to be completely happy with what we produce. I’m excited that there’s going to be another album and the material will be very inspiring. So why rush it now?”

Check out the entire interview with Justin Chancellor now at Bass Player for behind the scenes info on Tool‘s recording process, and much more!