Why Karnivool’s Thirteen-Year Silence Was the Album’s Best Track

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. The question was never whether Karnivool would come back. It was whether the band that came back would still be the one that left.

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. The DNA is intact. But the organism has aged, and honestly the aging is the most interesting thing about the record.

“Drone” is signature Karnivool distilled to fundamentals. “Aozora,” named for the Japanese word for blue sky, is frenetic and yearning. 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 showcase. The guest serves the host. That discipline, across an album this long, is what separates In Verses from the bloated comeback records that clog the genre.

Produced by Forrester Savell, the sound is spacious, warm, detailed without being clinical. There is minor bloat in the second half and the ballad-heavy stretch slows the momentum. 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.