To outsiders their music is a strange proposition, combining outsider art, psych-prog flourishes, and faux-deep philosophizing—something like swirling together the Cliffnotes to Brave New World, a VHS of Fight Club, and five sheets of acid in a test tube. But Tool have inspired one of rock music’s most cultishly devoted fanbases. All this with only only four albums to their name.

A wise man named Homer Simpson once laid on a couch, cigar in his mouth, smug look upon his face and coined an immortal slogan for the self-satisfied: "Everyone's stupid but me." It has been a useful phrase to cling to as a longtime fan of Tool, the polarizing polymaths who've spent the last 29 years making some of hard rock’s most superficially challenging songs.

Keenan’s military service became fuel for his angst, and provided the evidence and experience to back his misanthropic views of the world. Couple that with Generation X ennui and their LA base (the band’s home for decades, despite writing songs about how much they hated it), and by the time Keenan and Jones met with drummer Danny Carey and bassist Paul D’Amour, Tool became a dour band that reflected the angsty spirit of the early nineties.

“Ninety percent of my friends in the army were either gays or lesbian,” Keenan says in Joel McGiver’s biography: Unleashed: The Story of Tool. “Most of them kept getting called in and interrogated. I actually had a contract marriage with a lesbian so she could maintain her status.”

The band first met at the tail end of the eighties, when a gentle and jaded singer named Maynard James Keenan met with special effects artist and guitarist Adam Jones. Keenan was fresh off a stint in the army that cemented his cynicism and opened his eyes to the inequalities shaping the United States at the time.

On a given Tool album you’ll hear intricate polyrhythms and mathematically guided time signatures, tribal beats to make your third eye wet, and easter eggs which have led Tool fans to learn about the Fibonacci Sequence, ayahuasca journeys, and extra-dimensional beings. You know, the kind of stuff that makes everyone stupid, except for you. It’s no wonder that their fifth record, apparently just completed , has been called “ the most hotly anticipated heavy-metal record ever .”

Still, it’s been over 12 years since Tool’s last album, and grown-ass people who should know better (me) are still using incognito mode to Google “when’s the next Tool album out” everyday. This guide is not only an attempt to drag you down with me, but to understand why.

Why is it then, that for all of their obnoxiousness, and all of our good sense, that fans who should have long outgrown them still stick with Tool? Maybe it’s their unchecked bravado, their ability to make you feel as though you’re in on a secret—you, The Chosen One. Or maybe they’re just actually that good.

Most abandon the adolescent tendencies which Tool still espouse—arrogance, solipsism, know-it-allness—sometime into their twenties. Go to a yard sale somewhere in suburban America and no doubt you’ll find abandoned teenagehoods in boxed copies of Machine Head, Staind, Puddle of Mudd albums. But Tool cling on with bloody claws.

Keenan’s called some of their followers “ insufferable people ,” so consider them proto- Rick and Morty fans. What’s frustrating about Tool’s fandom is that band does seem to harbor some of the pseudo-intellectualism to which their fans cling, and yet the songs rip enough that their music is still compelling anyway.

But something set them apart from their downcast peers. Throughout their career, Tool have always positioned themselves as intellectuals. Their references to Karl Marx and Carl Jung, and their acrobatic lead singer made them appeal to headier types than their grunge peers.

In 1992, when Tool’s Opiate EP was released, the entire rock landscape had completely shifted. The year started with Nirvana’s Nevermind symbolically knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the Billboard Top 200 Chart, which marked grunge’s transformation from a local scene to an international influence. Opiate lay somewhere between the grunge sound that was in vogue, and the brazen heavy metal which was steadily going out of fashion.

When Tool released their first professional EP Opiate, back in 1992, the band were positioned as though the industry was against them. “Things really shouldn’t have worked out for Tool, but against all odds, they did,” so goes the opening line to McGiver’s biography. But that really wasn’t the case. Much of rock music history can be explained away by its swinging pendulum effect. The ding of the spectacle rock—the flamboyant displays of hair metal and glam metal which focuses its attention on the band’s image and their adoring female fans. The dong of sincerity rock—anti-establishment bands with a deliberately unkempt image, who are made to be admired for their forthrightness. By the time Tool came around, rock music had largely fallen into the latter camp.

(You won't see Tool's music in user-friendly playlist format like you're used to seeing in Noisey's guide series. In fact, you may have trouble finding it online at all because they're some of the last holdouts in the Great Streaming wars. Which is on brand, to be honest.)

The EP’s opener “Sweat” startles with a stanky, tritonal riff, and is tethered down by a swampy bassline. It’s the grunge trope that the band managed to refine on their next LP, Undertow, particularly on track “Prison Sex,” which turned grunge into gunk and horror. On it, Keenan sings a disturbing diatribe on intergenerational trauma and abuse, twisting the biblical golden rule: “I do unto others what has been done to me,” while Jones slaps his low E string against the pickups, causing that signature swampy sound.

While much of Tool’s output in the nineties was observably grunge—the half-screaming, half-swooning Cobainesque vocals; the plain, ugly anger; the anti-disestablishment title of their first LP (Opiate refers to that Marx quotation which college guys recite like girl scouts)—the band’s sound was too widely-inspired—there were hints of King Crimson, Black Flag, and Meshuggah early on in their career—to be associated with only one scene or genre. And that was so very grunge of them. What wasn’t so rock ‘n’ roll were the droves of record execs desperate to hire them.

Playlist: “Sweat” / “Prison Sex” / “Stinkfist” _/ “_Intolerance” / “Swamp Song”

So you want to get into: Aggro Tool?

“Someone get that Bob Marley fucking wannabe out of here,” says Keenan to a cheering, obsequious crowd on the first of Opiate’s live tracks, “Cold and Ugly”. From as soon as they got them, Tool have always hated their fans. “[You play] heavy music, and your record company, which has never owned an album like anything you’re doing, immediately markets you to the obviously stinky kid with the dreadlocks and the BO and the urine on his shoes,” Keenan told AV Club in 2006.