Tool: Every Album Ranked From Worst To Best

Lateralus, Tool's third full length album (released in 2001), remains one of its most brilliant offerings. If Undertow brought the band into the mainstream, Lateralus is the album that cemented Tool's status as the patron saints of progressive metal.

Full of shifts in timing and tempo, and including a song sung to the count of a mathematical sequence (the title track, which follows the Fibonacci numbers), Lateralus remains an absolute masterpiece and might very well represent Tool at their peak. Lead single Schism became a huge hit for the band, and for good reason - it was catchy enough to be memorable while remaining a quintessentially complex Tool track. The album itself is a masterful balance between perfect harmony and a breakdown into cacophony, and the track order is pretty much perfect, from the opener The Grudge with its military-like pacing to the trilogy of Disposition, Reflection, and Triad towards the end, three songs which form a larger whole.

Then there's Parabol and Parabola, combined for another groundbreaking video that clocks in at over ten minutes. Though causing headaches for music programmers in the pre-Youtube era, it and Schism introduced the band to an even wider fanbase. Long songs don't necessarily mean good songs, but for Tool, the ability to explore their musicianship without the constraint of traditional runtimes has allowed them to master their craft, with Lateralus being arguably the pinnacle.