It took Perth’s KARNIVOOL almost four years to craft a follow-up to their stellar debut album Themata. With sales for Sound Awake reaching Gold status in just a few months, SOPHIE BENJAMIN asks guitarist DREW GODDARD what took them so long.

 “We’ll try and do things a bit quicker in the future,” Goddard replies tersely, “but it’s just the way we seem to work.”
They haven’t been procrastinating, that’s for sure. The touring cycle for Themata stretched out for almost three years, and singer Ian Kenny juggled writing, recording and touring committments between Karnivool and his more radio-friendly band Birds Of Tokyo. When you take these things into account with a band work ethic that Goddard describes as “meticulous”, the long gap between albums seems actually quite reasonable.
“Most of that time was taken up with jamming, and we really just put it together at the last minute once we had all the pieces out in front of us,” he explains.
“This is the first release we’ve written as a collaborative unit; all of the earlier stuff was pretty much just myself and Kenny. Adding more people into the creative process probably made it take longer too.”
Sound Awake is a darker, more progressive work than its riff heavy predecessor. Goddard says the shift is an unintentional one, but longer song lengths and softer dynamics do require an element of patience and dedication from the listener.
“We didn’t plan the album to be that way, but we’re always trying to do push ourselves to do things that are new for us - it makes for more interesting music as far as I’m concerned.
“It seems that people almost have some sort of attention deficit, and we’re all really into ‘album’ albums and I think that’s what Sound Awake is.The bands we listen to are the ones where you don’t quite get it at first, but you go back and the music takes on a life of its own the more you listen to it.”
The band’s Sine Waves & Mirrors tour begins after a quick European tour to drum up interest ahead of an album release early next year.

“In the early days, we were told by some people in the industry that Australia wasn’t the market for what we were doing and that we had an ‘international sound’. I saw bands like Tool coming over here and doing massive shows and thought that surely there was room for us.”

Time and a lot of hard work has proven them right, but the band take the prospect of world domination with a grain of salt.

“We’re just taking it as it comes, we don’t have any set goals. If we put in the same hard yards and dedication overseas there’s no reason why it can’t happen over there. Just getting to go overseas at all is just fucking amazing.”

KARNIVOOL bring their Sine Waves & Mirrors tour to The Tivoli on Tuesday Nov 24 and Wednesday Nov 25, and the Coolangatta Hotel on Friday Nov 27, supported by Regular John and Coerce. SOUND AWAKE is out now.

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