“We’ve found a bit of value in taking pieces of music to a stage that are either not complete or, if I’m being honest, we haven’t actually hit that confidence point with them.”
After a prolonged period of silence – eight years to be precise – Perth rock outfit Karnivool finally released new material last week, albeit with little fuss or fanfare.
Karnivool are a band who have always done things their way and shunned normal convention, but the surprise release of All It Takes was both welcome and appreciated for the band’s legion of fans who have been waiting since 2013 for new material.
Not only has Karnivool released an early Christmas present in the form of a new song, they have also recently released Decade Of Sound Awake on Blu-Ray, which is a recording of their LiveStream celebration of their breakthrough album recorded earlier this year.
On top of that, Karnivool were also recently announced as co-headliners of next year’s Monolith Festival with COG, so all in all HEAVY felt it was long overdue to chat with the band about all of these new developments.
Vocalist Ian Kenny joined us earlier this week.
We start by asking him how the early reaction has been for All It Takes, despite the fact not many people knew it was actually coming out.
“It’s been great,” he laughed. “It’s been really, really cool. It’s one of things where you don’t… we just didn’t wanna think about it too much because we’ve basically been sitting on that song for the last year and a half. We had all these intentions to take it out on tour and align it with a whole bunch of live shows over the last two or three years, but they just kept falling over. We tried several attempts to get tours happening, but it just didn’t happen, so it was just bubbling away too much. We had to drop it and thought we’d drop it out of nowhere and create a bit of a splash. I think outside that too, more about how things have been, we’re also very aware of where we are right now people just need something and if you’ve got something to share or something to offer through a time when it’s all a bit sticky then why not. And what we can do, and control, is our music at the moment, so why not put it out.”
Musically, All It Takes is vintage Karnivool, with relevant subject matter interlaced with the unmistakable sounds of a band truly atop their game.
“It’s pretty dark,” Kenny offered. “It’s pretty heavy rolling piece of music. On repeat listen you’ll pick up some of the layers in it. It’s a pretty rolling kind of stomp of a song. It’s got this dirty synth and the whole of the take is basically a snapshot of where we’ve been at as a band creatively and trying to find our way through our own creative processes, which aren’t always the easiest things. I think it’s become this mantra for us lately as we’ve sat on this piece of music. You basically find a way through it really. There’s a lot of questions in the song which kind of spread a bit wider to what we’re all dealing with. Internally, really, it’s about our own process of what we’re trying to do and still trying to do.”
In the full interview, Ian runs through All It Takes in greater detail, the possibility of more new music, the song’s path to release, the Blu-Ray release, celebrating ten years of Sound Awake, why he feels it was such an important album to the band and their fans, next year’s Monolith Festival, touring overseas and more.
