The first time I heard Tool’s “Undertow,” I was sitting in the cramped back office of a college radio station in Seattle, spring of 1993. The program director—a perpetually wired guy named Keith with black-rimmed glasses and opinions stronger than the terrible coffee he constantly consumed—tossed the CD at me with unusual solemnity. “This,” he said, “is not like the other stuff coming out right now.” Keith wasn’t prone to understatement, but in this case, he was guilty of it.
1993 was peak grunge. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains were inescapable. Seattle had become the reluctant center of the rock universe, and every major label was desperately signing anyone who owned flannel and looked like they hadn’t showered recently. I was in my early twenties, writing album reviews for local papers and trying to make sense of how quickly metal had been shoved aside for this new sound.
Don’t get me wrong—I loved a lot of the grunge bands. But there was this weird moment where it felt like every rock release had to fit into this specific template: vaguely psychedelic verses, big distorted choruses, lyrics about depression and alienation, all wrapped in a deliberately unpolished production style. If you weren’t doing that in 1993, you weren’t getting airplay.
And then came Tool’s “Undertow,” crashing into this homogenized landscape like some bizarre alien artifact that nobody quite knew how to categorize. Was it metal? Was it alternative? Was it prog? It had elements of all three but refused to be limited by any single genre’s boundaries. The album sounded like it had been created by people who weren’t paying any attention to current trends—which, in 1993, was both commercial suicide and artistically revolutionary.
The first track, “Intolerance,” made it immediately clear that this wasn’t going to be another grunge record. Adam Jones’ guitar work was precise and mathematical where grunge was loose and impressionistic. Danny Carey’s drumming was technically complex in a way that made most rock drummers sound like they were banging on pots and pans. And then there was Maynard James Keenan’s voice—this strange, elastic instrument that could shift from a whisper to a scream within the same phrase, delivering lyrics that read more like cryptic philosophy than the direct emotional expressions most of Seattle’s bands favored.
I’d been assigned to review the album for The Stranger, one of Seattle’s alternative weeklies. I remember sitting in my shabby apartment, trying to figure out how to describe this sound to readers who were mostly interested in whether a band sounded like Nirvana or Pearl Jam. I ended up calling it “thinking man’s metal for the post-grunge apocalypse,” which my editor thought was pretentious but left in anyway. In retrospect, I stand by it.
What really struck me about “Undertow” was its intensity. Grunge could be heavy, certainly, but it was usually a sludgy, fuzzy kind of heaviness. Tool’s heaviness was sharp, precise, almost surgical. “Sober” was the perfect example—that descending bass line created this sense of inexorable movement, like being slowly pulled underwater. When the chorus hit, it wasn’t just loud; it was focused, like all the band’s energy was being channeled through a laser beam rather than dispersed through distortion.
I interviewed Maynard years later, around the time “Lateralus” came out. I asked him about those early days and how Tool fit into the alternative music landscape of the early ’90s. He got this amused look and said, “We didn’t. That was the point.” He explained that while they respected many of the grunge acts, they were drawing from completely different influences—prog rock, avant-garde metal, art music, and philosophy rather than punk and classic rock.
“Undertow” had this remarkable quality of feeling both accessible and completely alien. Songs like “Prison Sex” and “Sober” had enough of a traditional verse-chorus structure that you could grasp them on first listen, but they were surrounded by these strange, atmospheric pieces like “4°” and “Flood” that revealed themselves more slowly. The album demanded repeated listening in a way that was becoming increasingly rare in the MTV age of immediate hooks and instant gratification.
I still remember the first time I saw the video for “Sober” on MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball.” This was when the show was already on its last legs, being gradually phased out in favor of more grunge and alternative content. The stop-motion animation was so disturbingly beautiful that I actually called a friend at 1 AM to make sure he recorded it off the TV. “There’s finally something interesting happening in mainstream rock again,” I told him, probably sounding like a deranged person.
What’s fascinating about “Undertow” is how it created this third path at a time when rock music seemed to be splitting into two distinct camps: grunge/alternative on one side and traditional metal on the other. Tool rejected both templates. They were too technically proficient and structurally complex to fit with the deliberately rough-around-the-edges alternative scene, but they were too experimental and intellectual for the mainstream metal audience that was still focusing on speed and aggression above all else.
In a way, “Undertow” predicted where a significant segment of heavy music would go in the years that followed. The math metal, progressive metal, and even certain strains of post-metal that would emerge later in the ’90s and early 2000s all owe something to what Tool was doing on this album. They showed that you could be heavy without being dumb, complex without being pretentious, and artistically ambitious without disappearing up your own ass (well, mostly—let’s acknowledge that Tool definitely had their moments of self-indulgence).
The rhythm section on this album deserves special attention. Danny Carey and Paul D’Amour created these hypnotic, almost tribal grooves that made Tool instantly recognizable. Listen to “Crawl Away”—the way Carey’s drums dance around the main beat while still keeping everything anchored, or how D’Amour’s bass provides both melodic and rhythmic counterpoint to Jones’ guitar work. These weren’t musicians who were just playing the root notes louder; they were creating this intricate musical dialogue.
I had a chance to talk to Adam Jones around 2001 for a piece on influential modern guitarists. When I brought up “Undertow,” he said something interesting: “We were trying to create music that felt like it was revealing something hidden, like each time you listened, you’d notice something new.” That approach was so different from what was happening in popular rock at the time, where immediacy was prized above all else. Tool was purposely creating music that withheld some of its pleasures, that required work from the listener.
The production on “Undertow” holds up remarkably well compared to many other albums from that era. Producer Sylvia Massey captured this dry, unadorned sound that gave every instrument room to breathe without sacrificing the overall heaviness. There’s no dating production trickery—no gated reverb on the drums, no excessive effects on the vocals, none of the sonic gimmicks that instantly time-stamp so many early ’90s records.
I caught Tool on the “Undertow” tour when they played Seattle in the fall of 1993. It was at the RKCNDY, this mid-sized venue that hosted a lot of up-and-coming bands at the time. I remember being struck by how different the crowd was from a typical Seattle rock show. Instead of the standard-issue flannel shirts and Doc Martens that dominated most concerts, there was this weird mix of metal heads, art students, and what we’d now probably call “psychonauts”—people who looked like they approached music as some kind of consciousness-expanding experience.
The show itself was revelatory. The band played with this locked-in precision that was almost frightening. There was very little stage banter—Maynard spent most of the show lurking in the shadows at the back of the stage, his silhouette visible only during the most intense vocal parts. It wasn’t a “show” in the traditional sense; it was more like a controlled detonation of sound and energy. I left feeling both exhilarated and slightly disturbed, which I suspect was exactly the reaction they were aiming for.
What’s remarkable about “Undertow” is how it manages to be both of its time and completely separate from it. It could only have emerged in that early ’90s moment when the boundaries between alternative rock and metal were becoming blurred, but it also exists in its own particular universe, following its own internal logic rather than responding to external trends.
The album’s lyrics deserve special mention. While grunge was very direct in its exploration of pain, addiction, and alienation, Tool approached these same themes through metaphor, symbolism, and allusion. Songs like “Sober” dealt with addiction not through confession but through a more abstract, almost mythological perspective. Maynard’s lyrics read like dark poetry rather than diary entries, which gave them a timelessness that many of their contemporaries lacked.
I had a somewhat embarrassing but formative experience with this album during my early years as a music journalist. I wrote this pretentious, overwrought review where I tried to deconstruct all the symbolism and hidden meanings in “Undertow.” A couple months later, I actually got to interview Maynard briefly at a festival, and I eagerly asked him about some specific lyrical interpretation I’d developed. He just stared at me for an uncomfortable few seconds and then said, “Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a song about being pissed off.” Lesson learned—sometimes in trying to prove how smart we are as listeners, we miss the visceral, emotional core of the music.
That’s the beauty of “Undertow,” though. It works on multiple levels simultaneously. You can analyze the complex time signatures, the carefully structured dynamics, the literary references in the lyrics—or you can just bang your head to “Bottom” because it has one of the most punishing riffs of the 1990s. The album invites both approaches without privileging either one.
I’ve gone back to “Undertow” regularly over the past three decades, and it hasn’t lost an ounce of its power. If anything, it seems more prescient now than it did in 1993. Tool was creating music that rejected easy categorization at a time when the music industry was becoming increasingly obsessed with neat marketing categories. They were making lengthy, complex compositions when radio demanded three-minute singles. They were taking art seriously when rock was often expected to be simple and direct.
In that sense, “Undertow” wasn’t just an alternative to grunge; it was an alternative to the entire approach of mainstream rock music. It suggested that heaviness could be intellectual as well as physical, that complexity could enhance rather than detract from emotional impact, and that mystery was a virtue in an age of over-explanation. The album didn’t just sound different from its contemporaries—it operated according to a completely different set of values.
I sometimes wonder how I would have responded to “Undertow” if I’d encountered it today rather than in 1993. Would it still have felt as revolutionary? Probably. Because even now, when progressive metal has become an established genre and bands regularly incorporate complex structures and unconventional time signatures, there’s something uniquely powerful about Tool’s approach on this album. They weren’t being complex to show off; they were using every element of their sound—the unusual rhythms, the extended song structures, the cryptic lyrics—in service of creating a specific emotional and psychological impact.
In 2023, thirty years after its release, “Undertow” still feels like a challenge. It demands your full attention in a way that fewer and fewer cultural artifacts do. It refuses to be background music. It asks questions rather than providing answers. In an era of endless distraction and instant gratification, there’s something almost radical about an album that asks you to sit with it, to work for your rewards, to engage with it as an active participant rather than a passive consumer.
That depth, that commitment to artistic vision over commercial considerations, that willingness to trust the listener—these are what made “Undertow” such a vital alternative to the prevailing sounds of 1993, and what keep it feeling vital today. In a musical landscape that was increasingly being flattened into easily digestible, radio-friendly units, Tool created something with genuine depth and dimension. They gave us an album that wasn’t just a collection of songs but a world unto itself—mysterious, challenging, and impossible to fully exhaust, no matter how many times you enter it.