Karnivool: The 13-Year Journey To A Masterpiece
Karnivool’s Drew Goddard discusses the 13-year journey to their fourth album In Verses, their just announced biggest Australian headline shows ever and an unexpected collaboration with Coldplay.
Words Thomas Jackson // Image Kane Hibberd
In February 2026, Perth icons and prog rock masters Karnivool released their first album in 13 years, In Verses. It was Australia’s own version of TOOL’s 13-year wait for Fear Inoculum. The wait created one of VOOL’s best albums ever. It’s being heralded as an album of the year contender and is already regarded as a fan favourite. It’s taking Karnivool to new heights when they’re already 28 years into their career. Now they’re taking the album on the road with their biggest Australian headline tour ever in July, supported by British prog-metal band TesseracT and American mathcore quartet Car Bomb.
“Imagine if this one sucked. That would really suck. After 13 years of working so hard on something and for it to fall flat,” lead guitarist Drew Goddard laughs from home in Perth.
“I think Sound Awake, it seems to me like that's one that really has been a fan favourite. I just see In Verses as adding to our discography in a way that makes our body of work make a bit more sense as well. It’s consolidated everything that we've done to this point. It's great to have another album to build live sets with.
“But it’s a real challenge to figure out how to play some of it live. There’s a lot of parts where there’s sort of three different guitar lines going on at once, and so many different tunings. Like ‘Reanimation’, we're not doing that on these shows coming up because it's gonna need a bit more rehearsal time and figuring out how the hell we're gonna do it, because there's about four different tunings happening. So it's gonna sound different live. There’s no way we can make it sound exactly like the album. Same with ‘Salva’. That’s gonna be a challenge as well. But it'll be fun. We might have to call in some guests to help us along the way.”
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More than anything, Goddard says it was a relief to finally release In Verses after working on it for such a long time. Now he can focus on his favourite part, the reward of getting to play the songs live on tour and connecting with people. To celebrate the release, Karnivool performed a short Australian tour with small acoustic launch parties.
“I had a little group hug with the guys after the Melbourne acoustic show. I was like, ‘Does it feel like your life's not a complete fuck-up this week?’” Goddard chuckles.
“Sort of made a lot of the weirdness and the wandering aimlessly [worth it]. It felt like a couple of times where we’d try to get the album further and put it back and go, ‘I don't know if this is ever gonna happen’. There were some moments along the way with things happening in people’s lives. It was very challenging, so it was a relief, and it justified a lot of that stuff. Of making it make sense.”
Surprisingly, the writing process for In Verses started all the way back in 2013, right after Asymmetry was released. It had a stop-start momentum, and it wasn’t until 2023 that the band returned to the studio to put the final touches on everything.
“That’s when Asymmetry came out [2013]. I remember getting started with some early ideas. Like every record, there’s always things left over that are like, ‘oh, that's exciting’. Same thing with [In Verses], there’s things left over, I'm keen to see where that goes. If I include [up to] 2017 there, then the basis of most of what you hear on In Verses was already there, like the foundations of pretty much all of the songs, maybe except for ‘Remote Self Control’, which sort of came about [in] 2018.
“We had one crack at sort of trying to record half the songs with Forrester [Savell, producer and longtime collaborator] in 2016, then it kind of got to the point where we realised we're not ready and the headspace that the band collectively was in, and Forrester as well… it just wasn’t time.
“It was probably about 2023, I think around that first European tour that we did in eight years, that really put some wind back in the sails after all of the COVID weirdness and all of that sort of stuff that set us all back, and we sort of ran with that.”
Sitting with this album in various forms for more than a decade would skew anyone’s own perception of it. Goddard shares that you never truly know what you’ve got until it’s in the hands of the fans.
“I remember I had Kenny [Ian Kenny, vocalist] say, ‘Drew, it's a really good album’. I remember him saying that to me; he had to sort of convince me around the middle of last year. You never know, because I was happy with it, and I got to the point where I'm like, okay, I just can't touch it anymore. I'm not allowed. You have to get to a peaceful place with it and accept it for what it is.
“It's great to hear when it becomes real out in the world. Some real visceral reactions to it, some people getting quite emotional in some of the songs, that's when it became real. When we're connecting with people on that level, I think it’s a win. I just want to help people. I just really want to be of service. If Karnivool can do that, help in some way, be a release, or help people find some motivation to get through another day, that's really when I feel like I'm doing my job, in some way, in Karnivool. I just want to feel like I've got a purpose.”
When other bands who have been around for as long as Karnivool release a new album, it can be poorly received by the audience when they play new songs live instead of the “classics”. In Verses was so well received that for this tour they considered performing the whole thing in full. In the end, they decided against it, but Goddard would like to revisit the idea in the future.
“That idea was floated. I think that's definitely something I'd like to do down the road. It would be a big challenge. I mean, we've done Themata and Sound Awake, but I think Asymmetry and In Verses are probably the more challenging ones to do in full. It would just take a bit of time to kind of figure out, so that's something that we're open to down the road.”
During the writing of In Verses in 2018, Goddard took an unexpected side quest when Coldplay’s Chris Martin came asking for him to contribute to a song on their upcoming album, Everyday Life.
“What was originally sent to me was this long, eight-to-nine-minute epic called ‘Arabesque’. It's like a three-part composition. It started with a collaboration with a Palestinian trio called Le Trio Joubran that had that similar scale that is used in Karnivool’s armada, in the same key and everything. So it was right down my alley.
“I got this email saying their producer, Bill [Rahko, producer and engineer], introduced him to Karnivool. I think he showed him ‘Roquefort’ and [he] went, ‘that's perfect!’”
Unfortunately, the song changed from nine minutes long to a shorter five-minute song and sections were rearranged. Goddard shares there’s not “heaps of me left on the track,” but he was still thrilled and honoured to be listed in the credits.
“It was a pretty trippy day to wake up and get a call from the manager going, ‘Chris Martin wants to chat with you’. I was like, ‘What?” Goddard scoffs in disbelief.
“It was back in 2018 or something. It was a bit of a rough time personally for me too, just sort of feeling like I'd lost my way a little bit with the creativity. I was having a lot of feelings of imposter syndrome. ‘This can't be me that they want’.
“So then when it got taken out in the end, it was a bit of a bittersweet thing, but at the same time I was really honoured to be asked. I think they made the right decision because I heard the album and I think it's a great album. It's a very beautiful album. If they left that riffy bit in, it would have stuck out like the proverbial.”
In Verses by Karnivool is out now. Listen here. Catch Karnivool at AEC Theatre on Tuesday 21 July. Ticketing information is available at destroyalllines.com.
