YMMV / tool

• Awesome Art: Alex Grey's iconic psychedelic album covers for Lateralus and 10,000 Days, as well as his art featured in the CD release of Fear Inoculum.
• Awesome Music: Pretty much their entire catalogue, although Ænima and Lateralus are generally considered their best work. You can see the band's page for the trope for further elaboration by album.
• Broken Base: 10,000 Days has a bit of a polarizing opinion among the fanbase, as is Fear Inoculum due to the heavy wait for the album.
• Epic Riff: ...and not just on the guitar. The bass intros to "Sober" and "Schism" are probably the best-known. It's pretty fair to say most Tool songs are built around an epic bass riff, with the guitar and drums adding a whole lot of texture and atmosphere.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Tool has so many of these that there is a website dedicated to discussing them.
  • During the build-up to the announcement of Fear Inoculum, fans thought the album would have an Egyptian theme, mainly thanks to the band logo◊.
• Fandom Rivalry: With, of all people, Taylor Swift fans! Fear Inoculum was projected by many to overtake Taylor's Lover album for the number one spot on the Billboard 200, projecting massive outrage from a number of her fans. Sure enough, it actually happened, further fueling the rivalry between both camps.
• Fan Nickname: Danny Carey is called "The Octopus" by some fans because of his awe-inspiring ability to play a different rhythm with each limb simultaneously.
• Genius Bonus: Do you happen to be a kabbalah scholar, conspiracy theories nut, musician, possess degrees in psychology and mathematics, and have a passing familiarity with drug culture? All at the same time? At this point you may, unaided, begin to understand just how many, many obscure references and in-jokes Tool loads their music and lyrics with. Being genuinely insane may or may not also help.
• Growing the Beard: Undertow and Ænima were both extremely popular and successful albums, but they didn't truly make the band stand apart from and above other bands (see Vindicated by History). Lateralus was their real world-smasher, the magnum opus that proved how truly unique a band Tool was and a much more mature, fully-realised work than its angrier predecessors, with the masterpiece title track being regularly hailed as not only their greatest song ever, but the greatest song in the entire prog-metal genre, if not the entirety of metal. Famous metal publication Kerrang! wrote an article about how radically the album transformed and elevated the band.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "Faaip de Oiad," with its sample of a paranoid-sounding radio caller warning about "disasters that are coming," was released 5 months before the 9/11 attacks.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: When Tool made their first steps toward popularity, some fans reacted with typical outrage, causing an obviously angry Maynard to fire back with the song "Hooker with a Penis," in which he mocks a typical fan for having ever "bought in" to his music in the first place.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Most of the criticism leveled at 10,000 Days is that it's basically a slightly heavier Lateralus, offering very little that's different. For instance, the main riff to "Vicarious" is basically a rewrite of a riff that appears near the end of "Schism."
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "So when is Tool's new album coming out?"
    • Related to this, claiming the title of 10,000 Days as being the amount of time it will take for the new album to come out.
    • The above meme was considered moot when the band finally gave out a release date for their new album. And they weren't joking this time.
  • "Tool hates their fans"
  • The sequence of the protagonist ascending to a higher plane of existence near the end of the "Parabola" music video is occasionally used as part of the "Expanding Brain" meme.
  • People have begun to make memes and jokes about the new logo for Fear Inoculum.
  • TOOL HEIST!, used to describe when a user on the band's subreddit actually went out of his way to leak the album.
  • "What genre is tool?" ^note  A question that’s often asked regarding what genre tool falls under became a meme onto itself after it got asked too many times over the years.
    • "Yes." ^note  The most common answer to the question.
  • Danny Carey likes to play 4 different timings at once. He can do 5. But not with his pants on.
• Memetic Troll: Maynard Keenan has definitely built up this reputation over the years. Not just for the delays for a new album, but also his ability to get a rise out of other artists.
• Misattributed Song: For some reason (probably because it sounds quite a lot like "Lateralus"), more than a few people think the theme song for Doom³ is by the band. It's a very understandable mistake, but it's actually by Tweaker.
• Nightmare Retardant: Finding out what "Die Eier von Satan" is actually about.
• Paranoia Fuel: "Faaip de Oiad".
• Self-Parody: "Lost Keys (Blame Hoffmann)"/"Rosetta Stoned" feels like this in relation to "Third Eye". In the latter song from Ænima (1996), the protagonist tries to forcibly induce a spiritual awakening, implied to be done through psychedelic drugs. In the former track(s) from 10,000 Days (2006), the protagonist is an eccentric man dropped off at a hospital who recounts his experience of making contact with aliens after taking DMT. Doubles as Creator Backlash possibly due to a portion of the fanbase interpreting "Third Eye" as Drugs Are Good and equated LSD use to Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence, when it can just as easily become Cloudcuckoolander.
• Shocking Moments: In 2019, the band announced that not only would they be releasing a new album on August 30 after an eight-year hiatus, but that all of their albums would be dropping on streaming services for the first time on August 2.
• Signature Song: "Sober" was the band's biggest hit in the 90s and received lots of radio play. "Schism" may have overtaken it as their most popular song in the 2000s. Most fans cite "Lateralus" as their best song, though. To a lesser extent, "Ænema" and "Prison Sex".
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Yes, this band actually has moments where they provide some things that can provide such calmness, such as "Disposition" from Lateralus, "Intermission" off of Ænima, and all of Fear Inoculum, most notably "Invincible" and "Culling Voices". And that's to say nothing of "Descending", which begins with literally the sound of waves.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Wings for Marie/10,000 Days," seeing that it's an emotional tribute to Maynard's mother from Maynard himself. Can also count as a Heartwarming Moment as the lyrics are about how Maynard's mother should be allowed in Heaven if she's kept her faith for twenty-seven years of suffering. GIVE ME MY, GIVE ME MY, GIVE ME MY WINGS!!!!
  • "Sober", which was written about a friend who had descended into alcoholism and co-dependency.
  • "Disgustipated" can be considered this too if you consider the possibility that it's about how no lifeform on this planet is safe, animal, human or plant.
  • "Prison Sex", which is about the cycle of childhood sexual abuse and the narrator continuing the cycle after abuse. The video is straight Nightmare Fuel, though.
  • "The Patient," enforcing the trope of Good Feels Good despite how bad things get.
  • Most of Fear Inoculum seems to be this, with "Invincible", "Descending" and "7empest" implying a sort of despair in its calming and Lighter and Softer tone.
  • “Right in Two”, a mournful song about a pair of angels watching humans go to war for stupid reasons, and wondering why God ever gave them free will.
    Silly monkeys, give them thumbs, they make a club and beat their brother down...
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Kurt Cobain mentioned the music video for "Sober" as being very similar to the style of the Brothers Quay and was unimpressed, saying that the Quays could sue Tool for copyright infringement.
• Tough Act to Follow: Among their music videos, it's actually the opposite of the songs; while they've done a lot of great videos over the years, the ones everyone remembers best are the two stop-motion nightmares of "Sober" and "Prison Sex" from their first studio album, Undertow.
• Unintentional Period Piece: "Hooker With a Penis" was obviously written before the age of online file sharing. There's no guarantee that any fan of a musical artist has ever paid a dime to listen to their music.
• Vindicated by History: A minor example, but for the longest time Tool got lumped in with a bunch of bands they had nothing in common with. When they released Undertow, critics tried to compare them to Grunge or Industrial Metal. When they released Ænima, the critics shoehorned them within Nu Metal bands like Korn or Limp Bizkit (which severely irritated Maynard, as he loathed both bands). Lateralus seemed to finally set everyone straight, making it absolutely clear Tool was their own thing.

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