Fear Inoculum: One Album, One Road, No Filter

Albany Highway, WA | Monday 2 March 2026

Before We Start

The following is an insight into one neurodivergent person's brain and mind. What goes through the vast experience of space between one ear and the other on a five-hour drive back from Denmark in the Great Southern to home in East Fremantle on Monday 2 March 2026.

I went down to see a mate. Saturday night concert. Finally saw Jet perform "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" live for the first time since early 2000s in Melbourne. It was a hell of an experience. It turned into a full musical weekend and a bit of a bachelor road trip because wife & son stayed home. Two nights away, no guilt, just total immersion in musical therapy.

Some people pay professionals for that framework. For me, I put the headphones on, press play, and let whatever is coming through the eardrums take over. It is high-intensity, word-heavy, electronically brutal, sensory-overloading stuff that should overwhelm but does not. It is the opposite. It is calming. These sessions are straight-up meditation for me.

What I did: Tool's Fear Inoculum (2019), full album front to back. I had one phone blasting into headphones (swapped AirPods to Sony WH-1000XM5 partway through when the battery died) and another device with a Bluetooth mic clipped to my shirt collar recording every thought live. No filter, no holding back.

I am a duck on a pond. I look peaceful on top but my feet are kicking like mad underneath. You might think it is just a bloke rambling on a five-hour drive. But if you are neurodivergent, or if music hits you the way it hits me, there might be something in here that resonates.

I realised at the end that I had missed narrating the very first track. Classic me. So I looped back and did it after the finale. Introduction written last. It is a winning formula.

Track 1: Fear Inoculum

(Narrated at the end after looping back) The opening note sounds like an old Polaroid flash. It has that pop and then a long echo hanging off it in a chamber until it fizzles out. That happens maybe seventy or eighty times. Then a low shallow synth drifts in underneath like a cello finding a note in the dark. Danny Carey kicks in with his drums and suddenly there is this eastern, almost Indian sound. It has a hint of Bollywood before it snaps back to something cleaner.

This was a 2019 release. Contagion. Fear. Venom in mania.

Then 2020 happened and the world went to absolute shit.

Maybe it is a coincidence, but these guys smelled something coming. "There's venom in mania" loops back at the end like a knife. The deceiver says you belong to me. Fuck off. Immunity. Exhale the bullshit. Allergy to the lies.

Track 2: Pneuma

I have only really discovered Tool properly in the last few months. But there is something in the formula, the calculus, the equation they use that is just electric. It connects straight to the spine. I have read that their music has a mathematical backbone and I can feel it in my bones.

We are all one. We are one spark. We are one breath. This song is pure consciousness. All that modern physics stuff like black holes and quantum whatever is often externalised to make it sound more complicated than it is. But this track just says: wake up, child. Release what is within. Release the light.

Three years ago, before my ADHD diagnosis at 48, I thought heaps of things were completely unattainable. But now? Every day is a win. I catch myself air-guitaring like a madman to this song, thinking that if the guitar was in front of me right now, I could actually play this. That old mental wall I built has dissolved. The only reason anything feels unattainable is because I am not practising yet.

Track 3: Litanie Contre La Peur into Track 4: Invincible

Litanie contre la Peur is a short 2:15 interlude bridging one world to the next. Then it flows straight into Invincible. I absolutely love this song.

It reminded me of Unstoppable by Sia. That track broke me three or four days after I got my auDHD diagnosis. I was playing it on loop in Fremantle and I just lost it. Standing there in the queue by myself with tears streaming down my face. At 48 years old I finally understood what it felt like to actually hear music.

Now I am back in musical therapy. This album has been one of the biggest healing tools I have ever found for remapping stuff I did not even know needed remapping. Struggle to remain, consequential, warrior, shield down. It is like religion.

Track 5: Legion Inoculant into Track 6: Descending

This starts with layers and layers of depth. It has spiritual, monastic voices and then dark ethereal undertones floating above. Deep background whispers sound like Poltergeist through a broken sound system.

Descending kicks in with ninety-six percent thunderstorm and waves crashing on a beach.

Lyrics start about a minute in: Fall through the midnight. The epilogue of our unfavourable slumber. It is thirteen minutes long. I can feel it at the back of my skull where it meets the spine. Like a massage. Towards the end it feels like they are cleaning the muck out of your skull and pulling the stress out.

Track 7: Culling Voices

The Road Note: 172.9 at the servo. The album's called Fear Inoculum and I am being inoculated against the fear of fuel receipts in real time. My phone keeps transcribing this track as "Calming Noises." For the first time in 51 years, the AI might actually be right.

The guitar bloops away for two full minutes. The voice comes in around 40 seconds: Psych. Use it through me. Eat it. 

At four minutes 32 there is a massive gap where someone is just tapping on the guitar strings and building pressure. Then it comes. Those sharp clarity notes lift up and the guitar takes fully over. I am driving with my left hand air-guitaring the strings and my right hand holding an imaginary pick while still steering.

Track 8: Chocolate Chip Trip

This track fascinates me. It feels like you drop into a space where the music becomes reality and everything else just melts away. It sounds confronting at first. Heavy. It is the fear inoculation in action because you are facing what you do not understand instead of running from it.

My mind does the same thing this album does. It starts in one place, finishes somewhere completely different, and jumps all over the shop. Abstract. Chaotic. Exactly how I write: middle first, then the beginning, then the end, then back again. It ends with a huge Buddhist gong and everything drifting anticlockwise through the headphones until it fades into nothing.

Track 9: 7empest

I am at the Williams BP Roadhouse with hot chips and salt and vinegar. The Albany Highway is absolutely choked with caravans because of the long weekend. I wait, I watch, I pick my gap, and I go. It is fine. That is the Fear Inoculum thing working.

The lyric that stops me: Keep calm. Keep going. 

The words say one thing, the music underneath says something completely different, and somehow both are true at the same time. I am not calm and I am also calm. That is the paradox of this brain. This track is 15 minutes of pure storytelling with no filler. Tool came to Perth last year and I missed it. I will not make that mistake twice.

Track 10: Mockingbeat

The album closes with an eerie sound like a bird screeching like it is trapped inside a cage. It takes me back to a childhood memory of family friends whose house always had a birdcage by the back door. That bird was the most alive thing in the house.

The question underneath is whether we even notice the cage. It reminds me of the canary in the mine. The warning you only hear if you are paying attention. The whole album started with an inoculation against fear and ends with birds in a cage asking whether we know we are in one.

Closing

Three hours alone in a car with music on a loop and a voice spilling everything is a solo retreat on wheels. No Bali. No fancy ashram. Just you, the road, and whatever has been rattling around inside. People pay thousands for silence retreats because they think they need the scenery or a guru. I think I have cracked the code: it is not about where you go. It is about letting the noise inside get loud enough that the outside finally shuts up.

The heightened self-awareness is the payoff. If you enjoyed this or got a chuckle, let me know. Want me to do more of these? Name an album or a track. I will drive somewhere and give it the full treatment.

Voice wrecked. Time for a drink. Safe travels, legends.

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