“Things are good, man,” he starts enthusiastically, “we’re obviously just writing and pushing on with album number three, so that’s taking up the majority of our time. But we’re getting excited about getting out there and playing some shows again. It’s been a bit few and far between so far this year, so it’s all a bit exciting… pretty much the last half of last year, we toured consistently, and we kept ourselves busy that way.
“I think we work better in the live/touring aspect of the band,” he adds, “because we still gel well together, and we’ve been doing this for a long time now. We still have to sit in a bus for a period of months without wringing each other’s necks, so we must be doing something right!” he chuckles.
“It’s exciting, it’s weird to have not played for so long,” Hoss continues, regarding the band’s upcoming tour, “we did one little run in WA recently, so we’re always doing gigs with other bands. But it’s good to get back and get on with the business that is this band.”
The band will obviously be bashing out a lengthy set of favourites from their first two epic albums, but the tour also promises a few surprises and a sneak peak at what they’ve been working on since the release of Sound Awake in 2009. “There will be new material in there, more than one new song,” he states, when quizzed on the setlist for the upcoming run of shows. “We’re excited to present that stuff: we’ll finally get to hear it live – [it’s exciting even] just for ourselves to hear it live. We did that with Sound Awake; we did some stuff before we recorded it.
“We do appreciate the audience feedback,” he nods, ‘and the feeling of playing it live. It’s changed the course of the song sometimes, when you hear how it comes across live.”
Karnivool remain absolute perfectionists when it comes to their writing and recording process, hence the long periods of time between albums (there was a four year gap between their debut Themata and Sound Awake). Hoss couldn’t hazard a guess as to where they were at in the writing process for their third record, but he did hint at the wait being slightly less than in between the first and second albums, something Karnivool fans can rejoice at.
“As a percentage [of completeness] I would have no idea man!” he laughs. “We don’t really work in ‘completes’. It’s a very different process for us. Sound Awake, about a month before we went into the studio I would have said was ‘about 10% completed!’” he chuckles again, “so it’s always an interesting process.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done, there’s still a lot of songs to be written, there’s still a lot of work to be done on the songs that are written. But it’s coming together and it’s starting to feel a bit more solid.
“We’ve booked in a lot of time, actually pretty much all the time after this tour up until the end of the year to finish writing and to process what we have, to try and solidify all that we have. Before we go into the studio at the end of the year. The timeline’s looking pretty solid. Definitely a faster turnaround than the last album, which is good and bad, and scary! But it’s a good thing for people who want to hear more.”
So is the new album looming as essentially a self-produced effort? “Absolutely,” he states emphatically, “we kinda feel we did that [learning how to produce themselves] over the last two albums. Forrester (Savell, producer of the first two albums, as well as countless other records in the Aussie alternative scene and beyond) was very involved in everything that happened, but the producer role is a funny one. You get influences from so many different sources, and so many different people you would want to credit as a producer on an album, but you just can’t. It’s like, a hundred thousand people. Anyone who’s had any kind of influence on what you’ve written at any point in time is a producer. The quintessential role of producer is a strange one!
“I think the idea this time is to back ourselves,” he continues, “back our abilities, back what we’ve done before…but having said all that, nothing is set in stone.”
