Genre: Progressive Metal/Rock

Thirteen years is not a gap between albums. It is a geological event. In the time between Asymmetry and In Verses, Tool released Fear Inoculum, a pandemic rewired civilisation, and the music industry dismantled and rebuilt itself twice. Karnivool were not idle during it. The band revealed in May 2019 that recording had begun at Foxhole Studios in Perth, and then the record simply refused to arrive for another seven years. The question was never whether Karnivool would come back. It was whether the band that came back would still be the one that left.

What Karnivool’s In Verses Kept From Sound Awake

The answer, across sixty-three minutes and ten tracks, is a qualified yes. Ian Kenny’s voice still sits in that rare space between fragility and power where a single note feels like it might either soar or shatter. Drew Goddard and Mark Hosking’s guitars still interlock with a patience most progressive metal bands abandoned around 2015 in favour of speed. Steve Judd’s drumming remains the actual engine of the whole operation, quiet enough to click a rim on one passage and massive enough to sound like deliberately malfunctioning machinery on the next. The DNA is intact. But the organism has aged, and honestly the aging is the most interesting thing about the record.

“Ghost” opens the album with a dynamic authority that immediately answers the question of whether the band still has it. “Drone” is signature Karnivool distilled to fundamentals. “Aozora,” named for the Japanese word for blue sky, is frenetic and yearning, and at six and a half minutes it never once feels like it is stalling for time. “All It Takes” is the strange one in the sequence, because it was released as a single in December 2021, which means listeners have lived with it for five years before hearing it in its intended context. It survives the wait. The persistent polyrhythms and the refusal to resolve into an obvious chorus sound better inside the album than they did alone.

The highlight is “Reanimation,” which features Guthrie Govan, and here is the part that matters, his guitar work is extraterrestrial but deployed with almost total restraint. The song does not become a vehicle for the guest. The guest serves the host. Govan left the lightning-fast chops at the door and matched the song’s energy instead, which for a player of his reputation is a genuinely unusual choice. That discipline, across an album this long, is what separates In Verses from the bloated comeback records that clog the genre. It is also the first time Karnivool have credited a guest as a co-writer.

The Thirteen-Year Question

Produced by Forrester Savell, the sound is spacious, warm, detailed without being clinical. Savell has worked with the band since Themata and the familiarity shows. There is minor bloat in the second half and the ballad-heavy stretch slows the momentum. The recurring lyrical motif on “Reanimation” gets one repetition too many, which several reviewers flagged and which is hard to unhear once noticed. It is quite long. Not every minute earns its place.

But the minutes that do are among the finest Karnivool have recorded. In Verses does not surpass Sound Awake. Very little does. It sits comfortably as the second-best entry in a discography that has never produced a weak album.

Ian Kenny’s voice still occupies that rare space between fragility and power where a sustained note might either soar or shatter, and Steve Judd remains the actual engine, quiet enough to click a rim on one passage and massive enough to sound like deliberately malfunctioning machinery on the next. The interplay between Drew Goddard and Mark Hosking retains a patience most progressive metal abandoned around 2015 in favour of speed. Thirteen years eroded none of that. What it eroded was urgency, and the record is better for having lost it.

Forrester Savell has worked with the band since Themata, and the familiarity shows in a mix that is spacious and warm without ever becoming clinical.

Listen to the full album playlist below.

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