For a Tool overview, you can’t do better than read my colleague Spencer Kornhaber. From Spencer you’ll get the vibe of early Tool, the allure of a grunge-era prog-punk-metal band, drowning in its own darkness and dickishness, that also seemed to have at least the beginnings of a program for transcending said darkness and dickishness. You’ll get a briefing on Tool’s esoterica, the mystical propellants of its music. You’ll get a line about the sound of Justin Chancellor’s bass upon which I cannot improve.

So I’m going to talk directly to the Tool fans, the ones who want to know: This new album, is it any good? Will it give me that Tool feeling? My answer is yes. Listening to it, I got a nearly unhandle-able amount of that Tool feeling. I teared up a couple of times, and when I closed my eyes there were purplish writhings across my brain space. You’ve heard “Fear Inoculum,” the single—musically a luxuriant, sinuous loop around the familiar sonic stations, lyrically a hymn to integration and deep breathing, with the vocalist Maynard James Keenan taking the part, for one verse, of a Satanic splitter/separator. “You belong to me / You don’t wanna breathe the light of the others / Fear the light / Fear the breath / Fear the others for eternity.”

These are Keenan’s themes, we’re toiling here under the same obsessional load, but there is a new emphasis (I think) on breath. The second track, “Pneuma,” is about, you know, the Holy Spirit, the wind that bloweth where it listeth, of which listeners are invited to partake with every inhalation. “This flesh, this guise, this mess, this dream … Wake up, remember / We are born of one breath / One word.” This is a monster song, a profound groove, the one I am most looking forward to hearing again. Adam Jones’s guitar is clipped, vicious, beautiful, and Chancellor produces those aqueous coils of reverbed bass, one after another, like a heavy metal John Martyn.

What else? Scattershot impressions. If you love the drummer, Danny Carey, you’ll love Fear Inoculum. He’s a huge presence, with his gongs and his tablas and his drum skins of varying tautness, unleashing octopoidal flurries that reformat the music in real time. Keenan’s voice is gentler—older—intact, still hovering and swerving, still making its folky dips and flutters, but with hardly a tight-chested scream on the whole album. The tracks are long: too long? Tool-long. I nodded off for half a second during the instrumental workout that is most of “Descending.” Or maybe I was entranced.

A ’70s sci-fi synth makes tasteful, whining, one-note appearances. There are battering Meshuggah-like compressions and long, soft ebbs of emotion. In my mind I saw not the illuminated neurology of Tool’s favorite artist, Alex Grey, but the flayed psychedelic carcasses of Hyman Bloom, almost explosive in their revealed energy. “A tempest must be true to its nature,” Keenan tells us in “7empest.” “A tempest must be just that.” What would be the point of a Tool album that didn’t sound, precisely and devastatingly, like a Tool album? We’ve been here before, to this dream within a dream.