10 Greatest Metal Albums Of The '00s
7. Lateralus - Tool
One of the main complaints that comes with a lot of bands coming out at the time was that the songs were getting a bit too basic. I mean, all you had to do was put your guitar in a drop tuning, play a couple of chords and scream and you could fool anyone's grandmother into thinking that you were the next version of Staind. Even though you could tackle some band's material fairly easily, Lateralus is where things get a lot more complicated.
After already making some of the most outlandish metal in the '90s with Aenema, this was Tool showing us that they had not yet begun to make us think. From the long song lengths to the complex time signatures that weave in and out of these songs, this is basically the equivalent of advanced calculus for anyone trying to actually play these songs.
No song lives and dies on its complexity though, and Maynard James Keenan packs one hell of a punch in the lyrics, with Schism talking about the fall of communication to taking us on a wild trip on the title track, where the entire song reads like a Fibonacci sequence constantly looping around on itself. Rock may have been getting a touch more eclectic at the time, but this is the kind of album that makes you feel like you've gotten an entire education within the span of an hour.