‘I Stay Out Of It. I Cook’: Even After 13 Years Between Albums, Coming Up With A Karnivool Setlist Remains Quite The Feat

As Perth heroes Karnivool take their long-awaited fourth release, In Verses, across Europe for blistering shows, the five-piece are swiftly turning their attention and excitement to their forthcoming Australian tour, and even hint at a future album.

Karnivool(Credit: Courtney McAllister)

Karnivool

In Wiesbaden, Germany, it is a crisp but sun-drenched, bluebird morning. While the rest of Perth prog-rockers Karnivool are slowly emerging into the day and dusting off the previous night’s gig, two-thirds of the band – bassist Jon Stockman and guitarist Mark Hosking – are up and about to ruminate on the past few days of shows around this part of Europe. And the food.

“We’ve had a few pork knuckles. And beers. You have to put your coaster on top to stop being served. They give you more drinks until you say you don't want any more. It’s dangerous,” Stockman laughs.

Thankfully, Hosking confirms they “haven't lost anyone yet - which is kind of weird for us”.

“We’re deep in the heart of Germany, where the beer is good, the food is good. We are spoiled for catering. So probably notching up the kilos while we're here, but you gotta hit a point where you just embrace it.”

“We’ve had a few saunas, just to compensate for the dad bods. I don’t think 20 years ago, man, saunas were a thing. We’re embracing new age Karnivool,” Stockman deadpans.

While the sun is indeed smiling down upon Karnivool at the mid-point of their European tour leg stretching before them, it really hasn’t stopped since the release of the band’s fourth album, In Verses, in February this year.

Barely a week after it was out, In Verses claimed the #1 spot on the ARIA Albums Chart. They’d already stuck this particular feather in the cap with their previous Asymmetry way back in 2013. The five-piece then followed up the success of In Verses with their inevitable announcement of an overseas tour, swiftly followed by a fervently anticipated national run across the Australian capital cities later this year.

Add to this their increasing crowd numbers that keep maxing out the ticket sales, consistently forcing tacked-on second shows to satiate fans who weren’t quick enough to snag their stubs to the first. Add a few album sales accolades in the Platinum and two Golds respectively for Themata, Sound Awake and Asymmetry – in black and white, things are just rosy for Karnivool.

Despite this, and despite the consistent touring in between a lengthy album gestation this time around, both Hosking and Stockman admit that approaching this first run of shows in Europe as the live debut for In Verses came with a queasy mix of excitement and trepidation.

“This time we've come back, I mean obviously we’re hitting a bit differently,” Stockman says. “It’s been 13 years [since Asymmetry]. The audiences have swollen. And this time, we’ve noticed a lot of the same faces appearing at different shows, which is really cool.”

“We are slightly older human beings, too, and that does make us have to attack our memory banks a bit harder to try and remember how to play some of this stuff,” Hosking adds. “But it's coming back. We always promise that the last show on the tour lot will be great!”

Even with these increased requirements to tour a Karnivool show – a far cry since they started out in the early 2000s – and the noticeable bump in crowd numbers and venue sizes, certain aspects remain almost non-negotiable for the band, like preserving that sense of intimacy. And not just intimacy in the form of guitarist Drew Goddard’s penchant for playing barefoot (“The last time I myself did that it was Big Day Out in 2011,” Stockman recalls, to which Hosking quips, “You just couldn’t find your shoes.”).

It’s more a feeling that each punter, whether hanging off the stage barrier or vibing in the shadows at the back, connects as though the lines, riffs, and unifying anthems are an extension of something innate inside them. It’s an unpremeditated, ineffable thing that Karnivool foster, but it is something the band are highly conscious of.

“It's a weird one, the intimacy thing,” Hosking explains. “The one thing we've gotten on this run is the sing-alongs, which is kind of weird for us. They clearly know the music probably better than we do!

“That really adds the intimacy when crowds come at you like that. I feel like the crowds have really dived into the new material, but a lot into the older material, and are gifting us with some responses that are kind of boggling our minds.”

After more than 20 years as Karnivool, the band has a smorgasbord of off-kilter flagships from their four albums, along with deep cuts, to weigh up before each show these days. Choosing the setlist has become like choosing one’s favourite child, and it’s something Hosking and Stockman admit ramps up when it comes to the Australian shows.

“I stay out of it. I cook,” Stockman laughs.

“It is hard,” shares Hosking. “You want to give them the best possible set that you can put together. The new material is becoming really fun to play live. I mean, it's challenging, it's quite different to a lot of the older stuff. But we chuck a lot of the new stuff in there. And then, yeah, just mixing that with good old solid…”

“Classics,” finishes Stockman. “We've reached the point of calling them classics!”

Earlier in 2026, the five-piece got to flip the setlists completely, taking their typical heavy, amp-stacked shows and pulling them piece by piece into an acoustic offering that celebrated In Verses’ newbies alongside transfigurations of those Karnivool “classics” as Stockman mentions.

These small, cosy metro shows around the country pulled some of the band into new territory, instrumentation-wise, but more pointedly – and in a rare treat for fans – into the spotlight to answer some questions from the crowd.

“They came out with some spanking questions that I was not expecting,” Hosking admits. “Karnivool is a lot in the studio, and people see the band at these big live shows where we kind of let our hair down. But a lot of work's done at the other end [during the creation], and it's nice to kind of reflect on that and chat to people about it, which we have not done ever before.”

“It was good exposure therapy for some of us,” Stockman laughs. “But in the acoustic setting, like they’re completely different songs sometimes. I've found stuff in there that I wasn't really aware of. And it was also quite a challenge for me and Steve [Judd, Karnivool’s drummer] to sort of do something around that as well.”

While reconfiguring their new and old songs into an acoustic format was a feat in itself, the actual making of In Verses is a whole other story.

Reviving shelved riffs from years before, pulling busy, far-flung band members together at key creative periods, booking their long-time producer-mixer Forrester Savell in and aligning with his crazy schedule – there was a lot going on that could have meant their fourth album didn’t make it to the other side.

“I think we weren't sure we were ever going to finish it, in all honesty. That's the thing about the 13-year period – it’s just a dumb number,” Hosking says. “This was a trial-fail attempt, fail, retry, mental breakdown, runaway screaming into the forest, come back, rebuild, kind of album cycle for us.

“So there's that relief that comes with finally finishing something and it not being shit. It felt good to hit that point and say, ‘Yeah, we actually pulled this off to some degree’.”

“I think it also took a while to realise that it was done,” Stockman adds. “I had to get used to the fact that we didn't have to keep doing it, and that took a while. It wasn’t an instant feeling. There was like this ‘is it done?’ kind of look around the room.”

“And in that pre-production phase, we still weren't sure how many songs we had. So we were glad that we got all 10 – 10 is a good round number.”  

Soon, after this run of European shows, the attention will swiftly swing back home to their six-date Australian run alongside hand-plucked supports, prog-rock Brits Tesseract and wildly dynamic mathcore New Yorkers Car Bomb. While it’s a small-ish leg this time around, both Hosking and Stockman say beyond their Australian tour, “nothing has been solidified as yet, but there is definitely more touring to happen”.

“Now that we're rehearsed and we don't suck, we want to get out there and play as much as possible,” Stockman says.

Such a lengthy gestation between the release of Asymmetry in 2013 and In Verses earlier this year sparked inevitable questions. Fans of Karnivool know that each band member juggles family these days with numerous external projects between them (Birds of Tokyo, The Cat Empire, and The Veronicas, to name a few of the higher-profile ones), and so it’s with some understanding and cynicism that another 13-year wait for a possible fifth Karnivool album would not be out of the question.

But, while acknowledging the challenges, Stockman and Hosking are all but certain there are more Karnivool songs, albums and everything in between to be had.

“There are the challenges of writing, as dads with families now and other things going on,” Stockman relates. “But it doesn't make it impossible; it just requires a different approach.”  

“Our songs tend to not be individual units,” Hosking says. “They always kind of blend, and we do steal from other songs to make a song if we feel like a piece is going to fit. Finding that combination of everyone accepting a piece and it becoming a piece is kind of half the challenge sometimes.

“So the next album, whenever it turns into whatever it becomes, we've definitely already got stuff there that we can pull from.

“But I think more exciting for us is what else, you know? It's always what else. We'd hate to kind of rest on anything we've done before. We are a band that’s always said we’re gonna do things differently next time. So, there's still fire in the belly, so I'm kind of excited about what comes next, whatever it may be.

“For now, it’s more pretzels and pork knuckles. Maybe another beer, or two. Or three or four or five.”

In Verses is out now. Karnivool will tour across Australia in July - tickets are available here.