Opiate

As Maynard James Keenan tells it, Tool landed a record deal after about seven shows. They signed with Zoo Entertainment, and Adam Jones recalled the band accepting less money in exchange for control over their music and videos. They chose to open a three-album contract with an EP, which the label readily agreed to; only later did the band discover that an EP did not count toward the deal. Many of the songs that would become Undertow were already written, but with the label pushing them to lead with their heaviest material, they picked only the most aggressive. Sylvia Massy produced the EP with Steve Hansgen and the band. She had recorded Green Jellö, whose drummer, Danny Carey, also played in Tool, and offered to take on both bands. "Cold and Ugly" and "Jerk-Off" were recorded live at a New Year's Eve party at the Jellö Loft in Hollywood as 1991 turned into 1992; the other four songs were cut at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, and the EP was mixed at Can Am Studios in Tarzana. Carey remembered the band being broke, so the studio work took about four days, and because they liked how the live recording had turned out, they mixed it and added it to the record. Keenan's lyrics deal with religion in the title track and retribution in "Jerk-Off", and the closing "Opiate" is followed by an unlisted hidden track, "The Gaping Lotus Experience". Jones designed the cover's priest figure around the title song, and the 3-D art is credited to Jones, Cam de Leon and Fred Stuhr. Jones later found it funny that "Opiate", the song he thought the least aggressive, became the most popular. The RIAA certified the EP gold in January 1996 and platinum in April 2005. A 21st-anniversary edition limited to 5,000 copies appeared in 2013, the EP entered the Billboard 200 for the first time, at No. 59, when Tool's catalog reached streaming services in 2019, and for its 30th anniversary in 2022 the band released "Opiate²", a reworked, extended version of the title track.