One of the most common metal news tropes for at least the last six years has been discussing Tool’s new album. It’s been almost 10years since 10,000 Days, and we’re not sure how long we will continue to bring you updates about it, but to keep the tradition going, here’s the latest one.

As some of you know, Tool announced some dates for a new tour this coming January and if this was any other band, you’d assume there’s a reason for it – which brings up the eternal question: What about the new album?

Tool’s only show this year happened on Halloween night in Tempe, AZ at the Monster Mash Festival and, aside from the band dressing up as Led Zeppelin, they actually played a new song called “Descending”  or at least part of it as Adam Jones explained on a recent interview with Rolling Stone:

Yeah, it’s a working title. We have a song that’s probably about 13 or 14 minutes long, so what we’ve done with it is … I don’t want to call it a “best of,” but it’s a shortened, different approach to it. It is a new song. It’s like a vague movie trailer to the real movie [laughs]. Sometimes we do jamming between songs or some kind of segues, and it’s usually involved in some kind of new material. But that one’s just a little taste of things to come.

As expected, Rolling Stone took the chance and snuck in a question about the progress of the new record:

I’ll tell you, it’s wonderful. Things are really flowing and going really well, and I’m just blown away at the stuff that’s coming together. I’m excited and can’t wait for it to be done. It’s something I’ve been missing for a long time [laughs], that beautiful collaboration that we have because we’re all so different and have different tastes. But again, when you are all meeting in the middle and that thing you do that meets in the middle is just beautiful, it’s very rewarding. So yes, I’m very happy.

There are many more interesting details about the new album but the main thing here is that at least there’s more concrete progress about it than what we had before, but of course, considering their history on giving us hope of ever receiving that record in the near future, we should always keep some healthy skepticism until that happens. Jones also mentioned that they expect to have it done and ready next year and hopefully tour more but only time will tell.