“We Thought the Band Might Not Survive”: Karnivool on Ego Death, Collapse, and the Making of "In Verses"

Karnivool were never built for quick cycles or algorithm pacing. They were built for endurance. After Themata, Sound Awake, and Asymmetry rewired what Australian heavy music could look like on a global scale, the silence that followed felt less like a break and more like a suspended sentence. Fans didn’t just wait. They aged with the absence.

In Verses lands after more than a decade of uncertainty, false starts, and creative gridlock, and you can hear every year of that struggle in the album’s bones. This is not a nostalgia play. It is a reckoning. The band sounds like five people clawing their way back toward a shared identity, testing how much weight their chemistry can still carry.

What makes this return hit harder is that Karnivool never pretended the process was romantic. They stalled. They doubted. They walked away and circled back. That tension bleeds into the record’s architecture. Songs stretch and snap like cables under pressure, then bloom into moments of strange beauty. It feels lived in, scarred, and stubbornly alive.

In Verses is not a victory lap. It is a survival document. And that honesty is exactly why it matters now.

After a decade of stop-starts, what part of your identity had to die for Karnivool to finish this record, and what replaced it?

Parts of our identity, like ego and control, had to be killed off to find a way forward and to better understand each other. As challenging as it was to stop and start so often, it did allow moments of perspective. Through this, I feel we found a maturity that wasn’t present before. This allowed us to understand what record we were trying to make. Once we were through the hardest parts and we found communication through the tension and hurdles, we found a path forward.

Throughout In Verses, the author feels obsessed with reflection and self-erosion. Were there moments during the process where you genuinely thought the band might not survive?

Yeah, absolutely, there was. There were a few points where frustration hit a critical point, and the only option was to walk away, not knowing if and when we would be returning to the record. Thankfully, the time between these periods allowed us to regroup and understand where things fell down and where communication in the creative space needed further work.

A lot of progressive bands hide behind complexity. This album feels emotionally naked. Was vulnerability a conscious risk or something you stumbled into?

I think vulnerability has always played a part in Karnivool’s music. It’s one of the safest and freest spaces to be ourselves. To be honest, we’re all being hit with the emotional weight on this record just now upon completion. It still feels very new and raw.

Some riffs on the record date back 20 years. How do you decide when an old idea deserves resurrection instead of staying buried?

It’s not uncommon practice in Karnivool’s creative world to reach back to early ideas that were left on the cutting floor, as in some weird way, it all feels connected. Some of those ideas come back just at the right time. It’s pretty wild that one of the main riffs on Opal came from something we were vibing on twenty years ago.

Now that you’ve broken the silence, do you feel pressure to move faster, or does Karnivool only function when it ignores the clock completely?

No, I don’t think there’s any pressure to move faster. One thing we’ve learned is Karnivool works from a very different clock. At times, we would love things to happen quicker, but until we master the skills to manipulate time, we practice patience and more patience. We are, though, very eager to share what we have in our hands now with Karnivool fans. There’s magic that happens in those rooms night after night between the band and fans, and it’s something we just can’t find anywhere else on earth, and that we have missed.