Replicants released Replicants on November 21, 1995, through Zoo Entertainment. The covers album joined Failure’s Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards with Paul D’Amour and Chris Pitman, turning a friendship between members of Tool and Failure into an eleven-song recording project. Another Tool connection appeared on “Silly Love Songs,” with Maynard James Keenan singing the Wings song.
Tool and Failure had toured together in 1992 and shared bills again during the Undertow period. Andrews explained in a 1996 Daily Bruin interview that they had considered writing original music together, but their main bands left little energy for another commitment. Playing covers became something they could fit around those obligations. A four-track demo reached Zoo, which offered to turn the informal project into an album.
Choosing the material remained a group decision. Members proposed songs, worked out which selections they could agree on and retained all four demo recordings for the finished release. The sequence opened with the Cars’ “Just What I Needed” and closed with Pink Floyd’s “Ibiza Bar,” with Missing Persons’ “Destination Unknown” among the selections between them. The players also changed jobs. D’Amour, known for playing bass in Tool, contributed guitar, while Andrews’ credits included bass, guitar, vocals and programming. Edwards played drums and percussion among his instruments, and Pitman contributed keyboards, acoustic guitar and vocals.
That freedom became more demanding as the arrangements developed. Andrews said the musicians grew increasingly interested in rebuilding songs, sometimes retaining the lyrics while replacing the original music. The work could approach the effort of writing from scratch. At Failure’s studio, parts were recorded separately and unfinished tracks could sit for a week. “We were hardly ever all there together at once,” he told Daily Bruin. Andrews handled the engineering and mixing, taking on much of the work of assembling the album.
Keenan’s guest spot stretched “Silly Love Songs” to seven and a half minutes. In a 2026 interview with Stereogum, he remembered being invited into a project already underway: “That was them having fun, doing a thing, and then they asked if I would sing on a song.” His contribution was a guest appearance, with the four musicians determining the project’s direction. The album also included John Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?,” placing songs associated with both former Beatles in its repertoire.
For D’Amour, those connections led to another recording project. He told Picking Up Rocks in 2018 that Replicants helped establish his creative partnership with Pitman and Edwards. He wanted to explore jams and loops without requiring every idea to become a conventional song, and brought in Medicine’s Brad Laner. The four worked together as Lusk, developing material from their improvisations. D’Amour and Pitman eventually took the lead as co-producers when the others became busier. Their collaboration resulted in Free Mars, released in 1997.
