Undertow

About half of the songs on Tool's first full-length album were written by the time of Opiate, and Sylvia Massy returned as producer, turning down Prince to make it. Tracking began at Grandmaster Recorders in Hollywood; the band then took several months off to finish writing and completed the album at Sound City in Van Nuys. Massy suggested the Leslie speaker on the guitar in "4°", keeping Maynard James Keenan's heavy breathing and recording old pianos being destroyed. Henry Rollins wrote and voiced his own spoken passage for "Bottom", and Undertow is the only full-length Tool album with original bassist Paul D'Amour. "Disgustipated" grew out of a 1992 anti-vivisection benefit at the Hollywood Palladium, where Keenan fired blanks from a shotgun while singing "Life feeds on life". Adam Jones recalled buying two pianos for $100 each and asking the man who ran Grandmaster if they could shoot them in its indoor parking lot; he said to clean up afterwards. Keenan fired the shotgun, and Chris Haskett of the Rollins Band, credited with "sledge hammer", smashed what was left. Other bands later mentioned seeing the holes in the wall. On the CD the piece sits at track 69, after 59 silent tracks. Jones made most of the artwork, including the red ribcage sculpture on the cover; its nude photographs of a woman and a man led Walmart and Kmart to refuse the album, and a white cover with a large barcode followed. The liner notes list comedian Bill Hicks among their "inspiration". The band sent him the album, a friendship followed, and Hicks introduced Tool at Lollapalooza in August 1993; he died in February 1994. The album topped Billboard's Heatseekers chart and reached No. 50 on the Billboard 200 on 6 November 1993 during a 62-week run, helped by the stop-motion videos for "Sober" and "Prison Sex", made with animator Fred Stuhr; once the catalog reached streaming in 2019, it climbed to No. 19. The RIAA certified it gold in December 1993 and triple platinum in April 2021.