Undertow by Tool

Undertow, Tool's debut album, came out on Zoo on April 6, 1993, and it's a heavy, lurching, genuinely unnerving record from a band that seems to want to crawl under your skin. The band produced it with Sylvia Massy at Grand Master Studios in Hollywood, and a few of the tracks were ones that had been left off their debut EP, Opiate.

Adam Jones's guitar grinds and churns in slow, heavy waves, Danny Carey's drums hit with a tribal, complex precision, Paul D'Amour's bass rumbles like distant thunder, and Maynard James Keenan veers from an eerie calm to a full-throated roar. "Sober" is the one that stuck, a creeping, brooding dirge that explodes into anguish, while "Prison Sex" coils around a slow, sinister groove and "Intolerance" comes out swinging. It's the only Tool album with D'Amour, their original bassist.

It landed right when grunge was at its peak and pop punk was starting to stir, and it helped keep heavy metal in the mainstream, clearing a path for several bands that came after. The dark, haunting visuals that went with it only deepened the album's bleak, yearning mood. By 2021 it had gone triple platinum. Ænima came next.

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