10,000 Days by Tool

10,000 Days, Tool's fourth album, came out on Volcano at the end of April 2006, and the band produced it themselves. It was the first time since the Undertow sessions in 1993 that they'd worked at Grandmaster, and without producer David Bottrill.

It's heavy in every sense: Maynard James Keenan's voice drifting between a whisper and a war cry, Adam Jones's guitar grinding out huge, lurching riffs, Justin Chancellor's bass winding like a snake, and Danny Carey playing polyrhythms that sound like three drummers arguing. The progressive metal is dense and patient, and the songs unfurl slowly. "Vicarious" is coiled and crushing, "The Pot" builds from a nimble bass line to a full-on stomp, and "Jambi" churns and gallops. All three made the top ten on the rock charts.

It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling 564,000 copies in its first week, went double platinum in America and New Zealand, platinum in Australia and Canada, and gold across a string of European countries. Then the band went quiet: Fear Inoculum, the next album, didn't turn up until August 30, 2019.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.