Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta slams Tool’s ‘Fear Inoculum’ as “spa music”

Hatebreed‘s Jamey Jasta has opened up about his distaste for Tool‘s music, comparing the band’s album ‘Fear Inoculum’ to “spa music”.

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While appearing as a guest on the This Day In Metal podcast, hosted by journalist Ed Hack, Jasta shared some advice on how to ignore haters and then shaded Tool and their 2019 studio record.

“Whatever it is, if it’s writing a book, if it’s making a film, if it’s making a record or writing a poem or fucking making a recipe – I don’t care what it is – you’ve gotta block out the people that maybe don’t believe in you to do it and you’ve gotta find the ones that do, and you’ve gotta keep them close and you’ve gotta make sure that you do right by them, and that they appreciate what you do and vice versa,” he began (via Blabbermouth).

“I think it’s gotta be authentic, it’s gotta be from the heart, ’cause the stuff that really resonate to people 10, 20, 30 years in is stuff that I knew in the moment was ‘it’. You just know when you know. And sometimes you can bring that idea to someone else and they go, ‘Nah’, and they write your shit off.”

Jasta continued: “Or you can put your blood, sweat and tears into a record and some reviewer will listen to it once and go, ‘No, this sucks,’ just like I did with the last Tool record that sounded like spa music. And that’s gonna happen. But you’ve gotta roll with the punches and you’ve just gotta have faith that it will find the ears and the eyes that it needs to find.”

‘Fear Inoculum’ marked Tool’s fifth LP. In a five-star review of the album, NME wrote that it “is perhaps the Tool album for which the people who made it have relied on their hearts more than their heads”.

It added: “The days, months and years will reveal more about the new record. As with releases previous, there are wrinkles that will only emerge after the record is lived with and absorbed. But if you’re wondering whether ‘Fear Inoculum’ was worth the wait, then the answer is yes. If you’re wondering whether it’ll touch your heart, soul and spirt, the answer is also so.”

The album marked their first LP in 13 years, following on from 2006’s ‘10,000 Days’. Speaking to NME about the process of creating the project, Tool’s Justin Chancellor said: “It was never an intention of ours to do it that way! As time went on it just took longer and longer, and I think that stems from the pressure of trying to excel and trying to outdo yourself.

“There’s always a danger of looking back and comparing ourselves to what we’ve done before, so there’s a certain amount of stuff we had to work through to get to the place where we could create something new and pure and of its own right. I think that’s the reason that the process started to take longer and longer.

“The last time [working on ‘Fear Inoculum’], we were in and out of ideas a lot. We wrote a whole bunch of stuff, and then at one point we kind of threw it all away. We got a little frustrated a few times, and people needed to go off and do other things just to kind of get the breeze in their hair and get a fresh perspective. When you get stuck, sometimes you need to walk away.”

In other news, Halestorm frontwoman Lzzy Hale recently revealed that she once broke up with someone after he fell asleep during a Tool gig.