In Verses
My favorite band's new album, 12 years in the making.
About six years ago — I think early February, 2019 — I was driving north towards Pomona, NY, about fifteen miles south of West Point. This was while I was still in high school, back when I went to see my sports psychologist in person. Once in while, either when I had a big question or when I was due, I’d take some combination of local and state highways, usually two-lane roads, over across the Hudson and off the exit to Lime Kiln Road.
I’ve played the drums for most of my life, and I was always involved in a high school band in some form or another. My freshman year, anyone with an instrument was herded into the freshman jazz band, and we worked on a bunch of jazz and swing standards to perform twice a year at school concerts. Once we were sophomores, however, things bifurcated: you could stay on the jazz band track and join the Blue Notes, or you could move down the hall to the High School Band. I don’t think it had any other name. But that was where you went if you wanted to do something else.
In practice, this meant rocking the hell out. In hindsight, I recognize how well our teacher — Mr. Kirsch — integrated a healthy diet of fusion, funk, and other rad shit into our curriculum, really broadening our musical exposure. But there was always a Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple song to really highlight the semester and get us all juiced up.
I was on drums. My friend Tommy was on guitar. He and Scott had come in as freshmen together — most of us had been there since middle school or earlier — and immediately established themselves as the music guys. Tommy played guitar; Scott played drums. As I was first discovering classic rock in earnest, they’d already arranged a Led Zeppelin medley at their previous school. They were the true Ball Knowers.[1]
A common topic of conversation between them: Tommy would try to convince Scott that this “progressive metal” thing was the shit, and Scott would halfway brush it off. Scott enjoyed it, from what I can remember, but was nowhere near Tommy’s rabid fandom. This was the absolute zenith of contemporary music. This was the bleeding edge. Holy shit, man, it just rips.
I was the next target. I think there was (I’m not exaggerating) a fifteen-month stretch where I didn’t listen to a single damn thing other than Led Zeppelin. I was obsessed. They were the greatest band in the history of the world, nobody would ever touch them, I had no interest in anything else, thank you kindly.
Tommy kept telling me: “hey man, you like this super heavy groovy shit — what if I told you there was something even heavier and groovier?”
This sounds great, on its face. What Tommy wasn’t saying — and the reason I was resisting — was that most of these songs had some “harsh vocals.” You might know this as “screaming.” I was very attached to my self-image as a normal dude, and normal dudes don’t like listening to screamo shit. They wear jeans and quarter-zips and listen to Led Zeppelin and do their homework on time. They don’t wear eyeliner and black long-sleeved t-shirts under graphic short sleeved t-shirts yell expletives at their parents. And for that reason I resisted listening to any progressive metal for a good two years or so, no matter how pumped-up Tommy was.
He’d tell me to listen; I wouldn’t. This went back and forth for a long while, up until sometime early February of 2019, when I had a 90 minute drive up and over towards West Point, and I wasn’t feeling any itch to listen to anything in particular, and I figured, what the hell, I’d try it out again. And so I threw on “Mile Zero” by Tommy’s favorite band, Periphery.
I listened through it. Then through the next track, “Masamune.” That was the end of the album, so I went back to “Mile Zero,” then through to “Masamune,” then back again….
Something clicked. Hard. What had been a hell of a lot of noise — for years — suddenly had this deep groove to it, and I fell all the way in. I listened to those two tracks for an hour of the drive up, and then those same two tracks the entire 90 minutes home. Six years later, I’ve never looked back.
To be honest, I’ve never even really listened to much Periphery since that six-week stretch of discovery. Wanting to branch out, the next band I found was Tesseract, a band that I’ve loved dearly ever since. Next was Caligula’s Horse, a band that’s way less metal than it sounds (and my recommendation for anyone who likes good rock music — try “The Hands are the Hardest” or “The World Breathes Through Me”). Those two bands carried me through a good 18 months or so, until I branched out further into VOLA, Haken, Leprous, and Ebonivory.
I don’t remember the first time I listened to Karnivool. For those not familiar,[2] Karnivool is a progressive metal band from Perth, Australia, a city that’s closer to Indonesia’s capital than its own and 1,300 miles from Adelaide, the nearest major Australian city — between which there’s not much besides desert and spiders.
Coming from such an isolated place, Karnivool doesn’t sound like a single other band I know. I’m not even really sure how to describe them. Their frontman (who does not scream, for anyone wondering) is the only man who’s simultaneously held the number one song on Australia’s metal and pop charts (the latter with his other band, Birds of Tokyo, whose eponymous album is an all-time great).[3] Their bassist — Jon Stockman, whom I believe is the best one doing right now and it’s not close — designed the Darkglass Alpha/Omega distortion pedal based on his tone on the song “Goliath,” and I’m not sure I’ve seen any bassist use anything else. Their drummer, Steve Judd, is a name I don’t hear nearly enough noise about (putting people on notice here). And their guitarists, Mark Hosking and Drew Goddard, do things on guitars that I never would have considered possible — not in a Van Halen sense, but in a “how the fuck do you get a guitar to sound like that” sense.
I think I found Karnivool sometime in 2020, and I found them in earnest in ‘21. But, in 2022 and 2023, they were my most listened-to artist on Spotify. The past two years they’ve been second. Under the gun, I normally say that I have four favorite bands, and there’s no way of differentiating between them. But the numbers don’t lie. If I had to pick one, most days it’d be Karnivool.
You might be wondering where all this music talk is going. It’s pretty simple, really.
Karnivool released their last album on July 19th, 2013.
Their long awaited fourth album released today.
I can’t say that I’ve been waiting for even close to twelve years for this release, like some people have. I can say, however, that I’d resigned myself to Karnivool being a three-record band. The fourth record had been rumored for a long time, and they released a single in 2021 with the intention of putting out the album soon-ish after. Years later, we had two posthumous Mac Miller releases and no new Karnivool. Which I’ll reiterate, considering just how absurd that is: one of my favorite non-metal acts, a solo artist, passed away in 2018, and two finished products (good ones!) released between his passing and the Karnivool release.
On June 27th, 2025, another Karnivool single released, “Drone,” along with a fresh set of insinuations that the album was coming soon. I was just thrilled to have another track, and I think it’s one of their best ever. I listened on repeat for days, then on and off for weeks. Then, right before Q School last year, “Aozora,” along with album art, a release date, and a tour announcement. There’s no sexier way to say it than that I simply could not believe it.
A quick gripe here that, in the current streaming economy driven by monthly listeners, it’s economically irresponsible to release an album with fewer than four singles. The band said publicly that they wanted to just get the damn thing out to their fans, but it took seven fucking months from the first single to the album release.
But here we are. At midnight last night, Karnivool’s fourth album, In Verses, whose name contains two different puns and a Roman numeral because they’re the fucking best — it’s finally here.
To be honest, in thinking about how to land this all home, I thought I’d draw some parallel between that first car ride when metal clicked for me and this album release today. I thought something about the record would hit me like a ton of bricks and the comparison would just fall right out and hit me.
Here’s something embarrassing: I’m enjoying the first song on the album so much that I’ve only listened past it once.
My experience with my favorite albums has been that I’m pretty lukewarm on them on first listen. After a couple listens, I start to pick up on more, get a feel for the pulse and syncopation, and really start feeling the lines in my bones. For a lot of music, you can imagine, “if only I could listen to ___ for the first time again’ — with most prog stuff, I almost go in knowing that my first listen will be the worst it’ll ever sound.
Karnivool has never been great to me on the first listen. I truly thing every song they’ve released has gotten a bit of a “eh, not sure this is as good as the rest” feeling from me. I know what’s coming when I fire it up, and I still keep falling for it. Because the second listen opens up a hair. On the third and fourth listens, you start realizing how many damn guitar tracks there are, and how damn sick every one of them will be once you wrap your head around it. By listens six through eight, I start imagining just how loud I’ll be singing this in the car by listen 20.
Songs 2-4 on In Verses were previously released as singles, but the first song, “Ghost,” was a new one for me. I knew I wanted to be fresh for my first listen, but, after getting off my flight and making it to my childhood bedroom, I really wanted to hear one song. I got the headphone amp and studio cans out of my suitcase (that I brought north for this release) and fired it up.
I listened. I tried to hide my disappointment from myself. I listened to the singles. I went back and listened to “Ghost” again. A little better. I checked ESPN. I listened a third time, and I realized, holy shit, this is what they’ve spent twelve years putting together.
I’ve listened to the rest of the album through one time. I’m not quite there, right now, but I can tell it’s going to be an all timer. The last song, “Salva,” seems like a particular standout. On their second album, “Sound Awake,” the closing track features a digeridoo, a cool Aussie touch in a spot that absolutely rips. I wondered if they’d bring it back as an homage. They didn’t, but they brought in a fucking bagpipe instead.
But that first song, man. I’m probably 10-12 listens into “Ghost” by now, and holy shit does it bang. I’ve waited for this album for four years, and some people have waited for twelve, and the first song is so goddamn good that I can’t even listen to the rest of the record long enough to write a newsletter about it.
If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then writing about weird esoteric music that you love deeply and want others to enjoy is to dance about your favorite cathedral and submit it as a blueprint to a zoning committee. Truth be told, I don’t have much to say about the music, aside from the fact that it’s everything I ever wanted. I’m so goddamn happy that Karnivool IV actually made it to my ears.
If you want to join us ‘Vooligans and check them out for yourselves:
- If you’re looking for a song, listen to “Drone.”
- If you want to start with an album, good! Sound Awake is maybe the greatest album of the whole genre.
Maybe you’re a better listener than I am and you dig it on the first spin. Maybe you have to stick with it for a while. Either way, I hope that, at some point, you have the moment I had in the car in 2019 when it all came together. I’d love to share it with you.
[1] Looking back, I never gave myself nearly enough credit for being a damn good drummer — confidence wasn’t exactly my strong suit in my teens, as I’m sure is common among people who run substacks.
[2] Lmao I know you’re not familiar (and if you are, reach out brother! We need to talk!)
[3] And not at all metal — if all of this talk about distorted guitars makes you queasy, go listen to “Plans,” “Circles,” and “Wild At Heart.”