Puscifer

“It’s been six years since Puscifer’s toured. Six years. I’ve gotten COVID four times. Four. I’m fine.”

So states Maynard James Keenan following a week of jet-lag recovery from Tool’s European tour. The frontman joins rehearsal for Puscifer’s long-awaited Existential Reckoning tour, kicking off June 9 in Las Vegas. The art-rock trio’s fourth studio album takes a deep dive into society’s treacherous value of entertainment over information.

“A lot of the stuff on the record was reflective of things that preceded the pandemic,” he explains. “Surely some of that stuff seeped in, but for the most part, those observations are just my perception of the world as it progresses. That’s kind of what we do as artists.”

“Bedlamite,” the final track on 2020’s Existential Reckoning, graciously offers us a hopeful note: “‘Remarkable resilience through calamity/ It’s gonna be all right.’”

“It’s a pendulum, these changes we go through … that’s why we think it might never end,” says Keenan. “But we are part of this marvel, and that balance will be struck.”

The singer looks forward to his return to Austin, a familiar haunt from his days stationed at Ft. Hood.

“I would imagine if I were to explore more of the sprawl, it might seem different,” he acknowledges. “I know that there’s better coffee now than there used to be back in 1985.”