Karnivool Take A Look Back At 'Sound Awake' In This Retrospective Track By Track

Simple Boy

This has been the opening song to so many of our live shows now we just take it as song one, unless we’re trying to throw a curve ball at the audience. Moody and slow with a rhythmic pulse that makes you lean back a little and sink into the sound, it’s pretty great for opening up a set. Have loved showcasing my MalletKat on this one too, an instrument I first discovered watching Roy Ayers playing - because touring a harpsichord would suck - so having a MIDI instrument one hundredth its weight is very practical and so much fun to play… with mallets. (MH)

Goliath

When I first heard the main groove of Goliath I thought, “Fuck! What am I going to sing over that?" It took me several attempts until I found the right melodic lines that glue things together. Was worth the pursuit though, as it’s one of my faves from this record. (IK)

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New Day

In many ways this song has captured the real essence of what Karnivool are about as a musical project. Melodic and thematic, with as much feeling and soul as we can possibly pack into a song whilst still allowing for power, raw energy, grit. I remember we were writing the song, in a rented house in the hills of Perth, feeling it come together as a band was a highlight of our writing days. (MH)

Set Fire To The Hive

The bee riff, ha! This song is about as punk rock as we get and our first real musical onomatopoeia. Imagine a thousand swarming bees all hurtling towards you as you run as fast as you can to get away, throw in some rough and ready revolution themes and you have it. The bee can be seen to flee the heavy political heat, if you’ll excuse my assonance. (MH)

Umbra

It’s all about the tension and release for me in this song. The dynamics between the verse and chorus feel like different worlds and I love that. The final chorus/outro is a cathartic scream of loss and acceptance followed by a slow rolling exit which will always feels like goodbye, to me at least. (IK)

All I Know

This song is probably the best example of the masculine and feminine sonic balance the band likes to play with. There’s moments in the song that float quite carefree and others that deliver heavy handedly. Vocally I find this one of the most challenging songs to perform on this record. (IK)

The Medicine Wears Off

I can’t remember if we wrote The Medicine Wears Off as a deliberate piece to go with The Caudal Lure or if it was its own little stand alone idea that just worked as an intro, of sorts… Either way some of my favourite guitar parts are on this song. There’s quite an intense stirring end and in that space and where The Caudal Lure begins, it kinda feels like you just stepped off a cliff. (IK)

The Caudal Lure

A very Jon Stockman title for this song, he loves coming up with interesting references to song structures and feelings. This one is exactly that, a very aggressive mimicry of movement to attract prey, or in this case listeners! A challenging song to get through - something we enjoy doing, pushing the boundaries of song structures, trying things we have never tried before. It hits hard and takes some sinking your teeth into to really get. (MH)

Illumine

The follow on song to The Caudal Lure, we recorded the main theme as a brutal Moog Prodigy keyboard squeezing out some wicked analogue synthetic parts, really ties the pieces of the song together and cuts through at various points. It’s a fairly straight groove that pushes, pushes with a little bit of a pay off at the end. And a really fun song to play live (when we get it right!) (MH)

Deadman

Fell in love with this song as soon as we wrote it. Dark and brooding, the entire middle section of the song, the instrumental part we wrote in a jam session and it’s almost exactly the same as that first jam, which is amazing for us. We tend to dissect music and rip it apart before rebuilding it. Long and flowing, another very etherial song with musical sections that draw you through a narrative that hopefully leave you complete by the end. So much fun to play live. (MH)

Change

After All These Years is song written by Journey. Speaking of Journey, we wrote a song called Change. After all these years it’s still one of the most demanding pieces of music we’ve written or had to perform. Live this song has so many different parts, peaks, troughs and time changes it still takes me by surprise how epic it really is. (IK)