Puscifer

Puscifer began as a running joke and became something nobody expected: one of the stranger, more consistent creative projects in rock music. What started as Maynard James Keenan’s pressure valve for material that did not fit Tool or A Perfect Circle has evolved into a full ensemble with its own aesthetic logic, its own theatrical personality, and its own increasingly large audience.

The project officially launched in 2007 with V Is for Vagina, an album that committed fully to the then-novel idea of making experimental rock that was also kind of funny. Not joke-rock funny, but absurdist, self-deflating, genuinely weird. Keenan had spent years being treated as a sort of prog-metal philosopher king, and Puscifer seemed to exist partly to undercut that, to produce music that could be taken seriously without demanding reverence.

What kept the project from becoming a novelty was Mat Mitchell. The guitarist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist has been part of Puscifer since the beginning, and his production instincts gave the music structure it might otherwise have lacked. Mitchell’s ability to hold together a groove while Keenan’s ideas wandered is the skeleton the project runs on. Then there is Carina Round, who joined as a touring member in 2009 and became a permanent presence. Her voice does something Keenan’s cannot, it carries a different emotional register, and the interplay between them on albums like Conditions of My Parole and Money Shot is what distinguishes Puscifer from a solo project with backup.

The fifth studio album Normal Isn’t, released in February 2026, is being called the band’s darkest and most focused work. Early reviews describe a record that sets goth instincts against punk energy, that channels anger about contemporary reality through arrangements that are controlled rather than explosive. Tracks like Thrust and Pendulum reportedly feature Tony Levin on bass and Danny Carey on drums, collaborators who bring weight without tipping toward Tool-ish grandeur.

Puscifer tours in a way that matches the project’s sensibility: theatrical, character-driven, deliberately strange. The live show is not a concert so much as a production, and that distinction matters. It is a band that has figured out what it is and keeps getting better at being that thing. Normal Isn’t suggests they are not finished yet.