Tool's Ænima at 30: the vinyl remaster Danny Carey said was done in 2024 still isn't out

Ænima turns 30 on September 17. The band remastered it, the drummer heard it on vinyl, Maynard’s wife keeps a test pressing at home. You cannot buy it. If that feels familiar, you have been a Tool fan for a while.

The record came out on vinyl first

The birthday everyone is counting toward is a vinyl birthday. Tool released Ænima as a double LP on September 17, 1996, and the CD followed two weeks later, on October 1 (Discogs; theprp, 26 Nov 2025).

So the album that fans have spent two and a half years waiting to hear on vinyl existed on vinyl before it existed on anything else. Tool has a way of collecting details like that.

March 2024: “We just remastered Ænima”

In March 2024, Danny Carey sat down with Rick Beato and said it plainly: “We just remastered Ænima the album.” He had heard it on 180-gram vinyl. “Stinkfist” and “Eulogy” sounded incredible, he said, and he hadn’t heard the record “in an analog form in ages” (theprp, 26 Mar 2024; Metal Anarchy; the interview itself is on Beato’s channel, via Fourth Eye).

He gave no date. Carey said a remaster exists and that he has listened to it, and everything since has been fans doing arithmetic on those two facts.

September 2024: 28 candles, nothing in the mail

The album’s 28th anniversary came six months later. No remaster (theprp, 18 Sep 2024). At that point the story was still a mild one. Vinyl plants are slow and so are bands; six months is nothing. Then the 29th passed too.

November 2025: the test pressing in the Keenan house

Jen Keenan, who runs a record store and is married to Maynard James Keenan, went on The Vinyl Guide Podcast and said she has a test pressing of the Ænima remaster at home. It “still hasn’t been released.” Asked what the holdup was, she went as far as she was willing to go: “I will just say it’s not Maynard… they’re a complicated band” (theprp, 26 Nov 2025).

She also raised the part that stings if you run a record store: bootleggers are pressing unofficial copies and making money on them, while the official version sits in a box.

The band is aware. At some point they sold a T-shirt parodying the old Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” ad, aimed squarely at the missing vinyl (same theprp piece). A band that prints the complaint on its own merch knows how long the wait has been.

Carey said “remastered.” Jen Keenan said “test pressing.” Nobody in the band has said why it hasn’t shipped, and nobody has said it is sitting finished at a plant. Anything beyond that is guesswork, and there is plenty of it online, none of it from the band.

The years that taught the patience

Ænima is the record that turned Tool from a band with a following into a band with a congregation, and the years right after it are the years that congregation learned to wait.

The gaps between albums:

• Ænima: September 17, 1996.
• Lateralus: May 15, 2001. Four years and eight months.
• 10,000 Days: May 2, 2006. Five years, almost to the day.
• Fear Inoculum: August 30, 2019. Thirteen years and four months.

Stack those up and the Ænima vinyl delay is a rounding error. A fan who bought the double LP at 20 in 1996 was 43 when the next studio album after 10,000 Days arrived.

And streaming? Tool kept the entire catalogue off Spotify and Apple Music until August 2, 2019, four weeks before Fear Inoculum landed. For most of the 2010s, a new listener who wanted to hear “Forty Six & 2” legally had to go find a CD. Plenty did. That is what a fanbase trained by Ænima looks like: when the band goes quiet, it stays put and gets older together.

Justin Chancellor, asked about new music in November 2025, said what the band has been saying in one form or another for 30 years: “art doesn’t really have a schedule” (theprp, 25 Nov 2025). He was talking about the next album, though he could have been talking about the vinyl.

Where things stand on September 13

As of this writing, four days out from the anniversary, there is no official announcement of the remaster from the band or its channels. Fans expect something because 30 is a round number and because the test pressing is confirmed to exist, and that expectation is all anyone has.

If Tool drops the record on the 17th, this piece becomes a story about a long wait that ended on the exact day it should have, on the format the album was born on. If they don’t, it becomes one more entry in the timeline above, and the timeline is the point. The fanbase that has been patient since 1996 will be patient a little longer, and the band will probably print a shirt about it.

The thread to pull

Something I keep coming back to from Jen Keenan’s interview is the bootleg part. The official remaster is on hold, and in the gap, unofficial Ænima pressings are moving. The most patient fans in rock are the reason there is a market for the impatient version.

So, a question for anyone who was there. Did you buy the 1996 double LP when it came out, and are you holding out for the official remaster, or did you already cave and pick up a bootleg? Tell us at @realrocklab on Threads or X. And if you have a Tool wait that beat 13 years and 4 months, I want to hear about that too.