KarnivoolIt’s happening: after nearly 13 years, Karnivool are finally releasing their fourth album.
A lot can happen in that time. As fans have noted since the album In Verses was announced last year, listeners have gotten married, had kids, divorced, and remarried. For the younger ones, fans have finished high school, gone to university, and work full-time, mind-numbing jobs. And through it all, three albums by a band from Perth have soundtracked every moment.
Karnivool return this Friday with the fittingly titled In Verses — the follow-up to Asymmetry, released in July 2013. With a reference to the Roman numeral for the number four in the title and ten tracks that follow their gorgeous yet complex journey, In Verses is worth the wait.
Vocalist Ian Kenny, guitarists Drew Goddard and Mark Hosking, bassist Jon Stockman, and drummer Steve Judd continue evolving on In Verses. Drawing on their previous albums – 2005’s Themata, 2009’s Sound Awake, and Asymmetry – the group channels frustration and catharsis in a poignant reflection on their personal journey to rediscover their musical identity.
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The record serves as an effortless reintroduction for longtime and casual fans, as well as newcomers. It’s a bit of a gateway album, but still, there’s nothing simplistic about it.
Once again joining forces with longtime producer and collaborator Forrester Savell, In Verses finally began to present a clearer picture in 2024. Throughout the process, there was plenty the band needed to gain control of: confusion, frustration, and pressure.
A decade of life experiences is heard throughout the album. It’s an achievement—we’d wait forever for new music from the band—and a love letter to their fans. It revisits the past, while evolving their sound within their healthiest, most creative space to date.
An album over a decade in the making, you’d think that the band were certain that album #4 was finally coming together, a feeling of “This is it!” But Ian Kenny admits that, as ever, things in the Karnivool camp are never that simple.
“We didn’t know,” he chuckles, catching up with The Music alongside Drew Goddard. “What we knew was that we had enough of the record on the table to go into some genuine pre-production with our good friend Forrester.
“From there, we would have meat on the bone and things to work from. So, yeah, I don’t think we ever knew we were ready. It was just at its best point after picking the thing up and down a million times over the years.”
Goddard adds that the band only truly realised they were done with In Verses when they just couldn’t add any further finishing touches—no more layers, extra instrumentals, harmonies, you name it. There was so much fiddling with the record to make it perfect that In Verses was actually moved back – Kenny hinted at an October 2025 release date last year before the band announced its February 2026 date.
“The only point we realised that we were done was when it was like, ‘Okay, we can’t actually touch this thing anymore.’ Even when the release date was moved back, and I was like, ‘Well, hang on, maybe I can get back in there…”
Kenny interjects, recalling their message to Savell: “Yeah, Drew’s like, ‘Well, we moved it back.’ He goes, ‘Well, I’ve just got this idea!’ I was like, ‘Oh, crap [laughs]!”
But Savell has the same traits. Goddard quips, “I mean, Forrester was the one who was like, ‘Great, let’s remix the whole thing! He’s like, ‘Nah, just joking.”
Kenny: “He would, too. He’d love it.”
An inability to stop fiddling with their music seems to be a key trait among the members of Karnivool. “There’s got to be a clinical thing here; a name for it,” Kenny laughs. “And whatever it is, we have it. It’s more than just ‘Diddly, diddly, diddly…” After hearing the possible condition described as “musical madness,” Kenny notes, “Something like that definitely set in.”
Of course, the members of Karnivool haven’t been doing nothing in the time between albums: all of them follow other creative pursuits outside of the band, with Kenny also fronting Birds of Tokyo. But eventually, the pull of the Karnivool universe returned.
Last June, Karnivool released their first new single since 2021’s All It Takes with the magnetic Drone. “Drone is the sound of Karnivool entering a new era — a slow-cooked journey forged in the studio’s heat, where every note was tested and tempered,” the band explained last year.
“This track hums with the weight of vast Western Australian deserts, anchored by colossal rock riffs that could only come from our home. It’s both a reflection and a rebirth.”
They officially announced that In Verses was on the way last September, along with the groovy single Aozora. In December, Karnivool released the track Opal—a sweeping epic that features a repurposed riff from Themata, blending the band’s earliest creative journeys with the new. An unreleased number, Ghost, also pulls from previous eras of the band’s music.
“That was the first song we really started working on for the album,” Goddard shares. “It’s got that kind of throwback to the early Karnivool [sound], sort of like that Themata thing.”
Indeed, it does. As a guitarist, Goddard is drawn to sounds from India and Turkey, as well as an Arabic influence. He tries to sparingly fuse them into Karnivool’s melting pot of progressive rock and metal, but the resulting song, Ghost, didn’t end up too overthought.
Throughout the process of putting the pieces of In Verses together, the dynamic and spirit of the band were strengthened—even when it was tested. Goddard tells, “The spirit was definitely kind of, you know, not waning, but there were some moments where we were like, ‘Where is this going? What’s happening? How do we get this finished?’ I don’t think there was ever a question of the band ending or finishing, but it was like, ‘This is fucking hard.’
“This is a hard thing to finish this album. Every album has been progressively harder to finish, I think. But really, it just took being in the right mindset and the right timing for all of us to go, ‘OK, let’s do it.’
“When we could see that it was possible and the spirit and dynamic of the band was still there [it was like], let’s just keep doing it,” Goddard says. “It was a real win; a real weight off my shoulders and a big like, you know, tick. Thank fuck, album four, which was hanging over me for a while, is done. But now I’m like, ‘What’s next? Let’s get going.’”
After the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020 and once again halted the band’s plans, it wasn’t until they hit the road again—first with a run of shows in Western Australia in 2021, followed by additional appearances in Australia in 2022, but pivotally, toured Europe in 2023—that the monumental interest in Karnivool brought the spirit back to the band members.
Knuckling down after impressive live shows, the band rented a space in Perth to work on In Verses. It was a group effort, and all hands were on deck, including Forrester Savell’s. Opening up about the magic in the room between Karnivool and Savell, Kenny and Goddard detail the trust they have with their longtime collaborator.
“There’s trust, and it’s a safe space to be who we are and not worry about who we are and how good we are on our good days or how not good or how useless we are or whatever,” Kenny muses. “It’s more like, just putting the stuff forward and working with him, and he gets us.
“And I guess like most things, when you’re trying to be your creative best, the familiars are things that really help you get in the space and the zone. So, he’s a super familiar dude, and he gets us, and he knows us for better or for worse. And his own skill set involved, it just works. He’s awesome; he’s fucking unreal. But if you ask him, ‘He’ll be like, ‘Oh, fuck, they just kept fucking tweaking versions and eating all my jerky!’” Kenny laughs.
Goddard thinks back to the 1st of January, 2025, when buying a coffee machine was a top priority. “[Savell] wouldn’t touch the desk until the coffee machine arrived! He’s like, ‘Right, we’re good to go. Let’s do this.’
Giving a shout-out to assistant engineer Owen Thomas, who Goddard describes as “a weapon,” he adds that having a “good temperament” and being a good hang is an essential part of working with Karnivool—especially when things aren’t so easy.
For the first three months of studio time with the band, Savell and Thomas “were there grinding day to fucking day,” Kenny says. “Forrester, I think he ended up in the hospital twice. Owen ended up in the hospital once. People were just cooking it all for the greater good, because the details needed attention. It’s hardcore!”
But then Savell had to leave the studio, and the work continued for another three months. “So I was kind of in there with Owen, sort of having to make the calls,” Goddard notes, “but Forrester was just, even though he wasn’t there geographically, he was on with the tech, syncing up so he could load up the session and be able to tinker.
“It’s not really magic, you know, it’s hard work. It’s persistence to me.”
Of course, with over a decade between albums, it’s not surprising to find that Karnivool are very different in 2026 compared to 2013. But that interpersonal growth and understanding only served In Verses.
“We probably have a better understanding of each other these days, and I think the fact that we do understand each other a lot more, we’ve figured out each other’s mechanisms and how we work and why we work and understand them just a lot better,” Kenny shares.
“I think with that comes a far greater understanding of who we are and what we’re trying to do. So, that definitely helps when we’re all trying to meet in the centre of this beautiful thing that we have and trying to make it work the best it can.”
“It still doesn't always make it easy,” he admits, noting that there isn’t any interpersonal conflict, but there are sometimes creative clashes. “It’s just the creative thing, getting it to where we feel it needs to be, where that bar’s set on the pursuit of that is the hard part.”
Kenny adds, “I think there were times in the middle of the whole process where frustrations probably got the better of some of us. And, you know, you’ve got to either try and push through or take a step back and let it breathe. But, like Drew was saying before, things are feeling really good. Everyone feels like we've had a win. I think everyone’s still finding some really beautiful stuff in this record; it’s still feeling very new to us.
“There’s still a lot more to explore when we play some of this stuff live; I think everyone’s a bit itchy for that. So, it’s a good place to be for us. The other side of this record is feeling great.”
Last week, the band released another single, Animation, which has a sequel in In Verses, with one of the most engaging lines: “Feeling alone in a crowded place.” That song is Reanimation.
“We had that sitting there for quite some time, and it was just that kind of rolling, one or two sort of note line of mantras that we always felt was taking the song somewhere or just felt right,” Kenny tells.
Meanwhile, Goddard remembers listening to an early conception of Reanimation while travelling on the train and feeling hyper-aware of everyone on board, all leading separate yet interconnected lives.
“It was almost like the music was sort of reanimating the space I was in, you know? Each person had a story, so it kind of came from that, the opposite of feeling alone in a crowd… you don’t know what people are going through,” Goddard says.
“It was that kind of feeling of each person here, I was just looking at their face and going, ‘That person has got something going on in their life,’ and the music was like the atmosphere that was created from that sort of initial soundscape where the song developed from was giving that feeling.
“That’s one of those lines that people might relate to, because I’ve moved out to a country town too, and there’s a fine line between solitude and isolation, but I felt like some of my most lonely moments have been in crowded places.”
Kenny adds, “There’s a few lines that have stuck around from the first demos that made it to the record, just ones that we resonate with, and you just know there’s some value in them. They’re going to hit people a certain way; what way, you never know, but you just have to sort of trust them and let them out.
“There’s another one, that ‘I’d be so still and quiet like death was around’ in Opal, that was still a line that we just held on to. It always just sparked something each time it came around, and it made its way through the final lyrics.”
Some parts of Opal stemmed from Goddard’s earliest days of writing with Karnivool. “The riff in the middle and end was actually the first thing I recorded in the Themata era, on a computer at my parents’ house,” he explained in December.
“Twenty years later, it found its place here. Jon [Stockman] dug it up, and we made it feel more current. The verse that starts with ‘You’ve been holding up…’ was a section left off ‘Aeons’ from Asymmetry. The whole track came together in a way we’ve never really experienced before – these old, separate ideas suddenly just fell into place.”
It’s a deeply affective track that leads into the stunning closer, Salva—bagpipes and all (not so unusual when Animation and Opal feature a harp). Upon revisiting the early demo of Opal, Goddard says the track “just made sense, especially in the scheme of the album.”
“We still believe in albums, you know, and I think the song really speaks more if you listen to the album from start to finish as a journey,” Goddard adds, “but also if you’ve been on the Karnivool journey and shared that with us, hopefully the last two songs, Opal and Salva, will give you something… It’s definitely given me a release, sort of some kind of catharsis.”
Opening up about the last two songs’ joint beauty, Goddard continues, “Especially the end of Salva, along with Opal, is some kind of celebration. Asymmetry, the album before, definitely had some dark hopelessness, and that was a weird place to be sitting for 12 years with this stuff.
“There are some pretty dark moments on this album, too. So, I think we really needed something like that at the end. I think that's sort of what Opal did.”
There are essences of the familiar throughout In Verses, from Opal to Ghost to All It Takes, originally released in 2021, but the band also left room for surprises. One of them is Remote Self Control, a song that opens with fiery, rapid riffs, circles into other sonic territory, and returns to heaviness at the end.
“Yeah, we like that one too,” Kenny exclaims.
“That’s a fresher kind of thing for us that sort of came together very much at the end from some ideas that were kicking around for a long time,” Goddard adds.
Will the band play it live anytime soon? Kenny is quick to answer, “Yeah, when we figure out how to! [Laughs] I don’t envy [drummer] Steve [Judd], but he’s got it. Steve’s got his work cut out for him on that one! It’s fucking wild.”
Last week, Karnivool announced acoustic events to celebrate the release of In Verses. And they plan on playing for their fans at home again soon.
“It’s in the works,” Kenny shares. “We’re in India in February, then we’re back in Europe in April-May. We’d love to get out mid-year. So, July would be great if we could get out somewhere and do some big rooms and showcase more of the record.
“The tour that we did in September-October was unreal. Like, it was just the sickest vibes in those rooms. A lot of good times. It’s just such a sweet reminder that people really enjoy what this band does, and what happens in those rooms only happens in those rooms. This band is reactivating, and it’s a win for everyone.”
Reanimating, we might say.
In Verses is out this Friday via Cymatic Records / Sony Music. You can pre-order/pre-save the album here.
