Although heavy music rarely concerns itself with popularity and chart rankings, the hits this summer of Rammstein, Slipknot and now Tool have been especially impressive. Following Slipknot’s #1 position on Billboard for We Are Not Your Kind (Roadrunner), Tool’s Fear Inoculum (Tool Disectional/Volcano/RCA Records) is the number one record on the Billboard (America) chart, beating out platinum pop artists such as Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift. The band sold over the U.S. sales charts, selling 270,000 units, of that total over 248,000 were in traditional album sales (the physical album version). The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units. Units are comprised of traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). The band also has #1 records with the album debuting at #1 in Australia, Norway, New Zealand, and Belgium, as well as Top 5 debuts in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, and Finland.Continue reading →