Gary Clark Jr. In June 2020, the band announced that it will cancel its upcoming 2020 North American tour entirely, after initially postponing a handful of dates due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The following August, Carey noted that the band had entered a hiatus, but that he still hoped they would reconvene in the future to record an EP, which the band would have more freedom in releasing due to no longer being signed to a record label. On October 27, 2020, an instrumental song titled "The Witness" was released featuring Jones, Chancellor, and Carey, and featuring production from Barresi, though the song was credited to Jones, not the band itself. "Opiate" was re-recorded and released as "Opiate²" or "Opiate Squared" on March 1, 2022. It is almost twice as long as the original and includes the same lyrics as the live version, plus the extended instrumental midsection. A music video directed by Dominic Hailstone was released on March 18, 2022, to commemorate the EP's 30th anniversary. Carey mentioned in the same month that the band has been working on new material for their sixth studio album: "I'm sure it won't take us this long for the next one. We even had some stuff left over from the last one that we'll develop. We have head starts on three or four new songs." Musical style and influences Musical style Tool's musical style has been described as alternative metal, art rock, post-metal, progressive rock, progressive metal, and heavy metal. Tool was described by Patrick Donovan of The Age as "the thinking person's metal band. Cerebral and visceral, soft and heavy, melodic and abrasive, tender and brutal, familiar and strange, western and eastern, beautiful and ugly, taut yet sprawling and epic, they are a tangle of contradictions." Tool has gained critical praise from the International Herald Tribunes C.B. Liddell for their complex and ever-evolving sound. Describing their general sound, AllMusic refers to them as "grinding, post-Jane's Addiction heavy metal", and The New York Times sees similarities to "Led Zeppelin's heaving, battering guitar riffs and Middle Eastern modes". Their 2001 work Lateralus was compared by Allmusic to Pink Floyd's Meddle (1971), but thirty years later and altered by "Tool's impulse to cram every inch of infinity with hard guitar meat and absolute dread". Tool had been labelled as post-metal in 1993 and 1996, as well as in 2006, after the term came into