“Sober” by Tool

"Sober" was the second single pulled from Undertow, Tool's 1993 debut album, and it creeps up on you like a hangover with a grudge. Maynard James Keenan sings it, Adam Jones plays guitar, Paul D'Amour plays bass and Danny Carey drums, and all four share the writing credit; Sylvia Massy produced it with the band and engineered the sessions, and Ron Saint Germain mixed it.

The song crawls in on a slow, sludgy bassline, all menace and patience, and then the whole band lurches forward like a floor giving way. Keenan goes from a wounded murmur to a full-throated bellow and back again, and Carey pounds out a heavy, deliberate groove that sounds less like drumming than demolition. This is alternative metal with a brain and a bruise, heavy as a stone but built with real care.

What it's about is darker than any riff. Jones has said the song concerns a friend of the band whose creativity only surfaced when he was high, a guy who caught plenty of grief for it, and the track sits right inside that knot of blame, self-destruction and art. Zoo Entertainment put it out, and it followed "Prison Sex" as Tool's calling card.

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