In Heart Wakes To New Release New Album ‘Incarnation’ On Friday…

‘If you look at the arc of yin and yang – black and white being softest to heaviest – we’ve basically gone to that heavy realm and we’ve just coloured that in more. So it’s giving more fans of what they know, what we can do, but then exploring what’s the shades of grey around that and really going into the minutia of that.’

Jake Taylor, the heavy imposing vocals of In Hearts Wake explains the sound behind the brutal new album Incarnation out on July 12.

‘What does that look like without feeling like we’re doing the same thing on every track. So I think we had to go deeper rather than wider. And in that depth we found what is the extremities of doing production that we can do? What’s the deepest I can go with my vocals in terms of finding a range?’

Incarnation, the bands sixth album is eleven tracks of extreme aggressiveness, whether it’s guitars, vocals or even the insane drums and bass beats underneath which is the thematic continuation, a mirror, of debut album Divination exploring the other side of the Tarot.

‘With ‘Divination’, you’ve got the four elements. We’d always left the other half of ‘Divination’ untold. There’s twenty-two tarot cards in the Major Arcana, for those that don’t know, merging from The Devil, The Lovers, The Fool, all the way around these archetypes found in almost every movie, every book. These are archetypes for a reason. When you leave a story like that untold, it does feel like you as an artist, you need to finish that. Breaking up the four elements didn’t feel right to be doing it in the middle of that. So this is the final, the bookend, to something that we’ve always wanted to do. Dunno if we knew that we would always do it, but it was always this desire out there. So the timing’s perfect.’

Sonically, the album puts its foot on the throat of your stereo from opening track Spitting Nails (Wheel Of Fortune) and delivers blast beats, stank face breakdowns and lyrical lines begging to screamed loud right through to track Shellshock (The High Priestess) near the end. Going heavier and deeper into The Flood (Justice), Tyrant (The Emperor) and Gen Doom (The Hierophant) each track teasing how enormous they will be live.

‘It will really translate live, I feel in a big sound system setting. It’ll almost feel like you’re at, not a rave, but to a degree. There’s going to be, particularly ‘The Flood’, it will be a whole new experience for fans hearing that live.’

The band will back up the album with a national tour here in September with Paleface, King 810 and Gravemind which will also signify the last days with bassist Kyle Erich.

‘We want Kyle to come and say goodbye to the fans and we want to properly say goodbye with Kyle. I feel it’s going to be a balance. The set list is not in stone, but we’re not going to shy away from the fact that we have this beautiful opportunity with Kyle. At the same time, an opportunity to play stuff from the new record. So I feel it’s going to be balanced in my gut feeling. I don’t think we’re going to sway one way or the other. So yeah, bit of the old, bit of the new and we’ve brought the heaviest bands we could possibly find to really go to that shade of darkness that we want to convey.’

Which leads to what does a future look like without Kyle?

‘The reason why Kyle left is really encapsulated in the farewell video. We did our best to have it be more than just a statement. What that video was the statement, and he had decided that he was leaving a year and a half, two years ago now , it’s a long time ago, but it wasn’t like, ‘Hey guys I’m outta here!’. It was like, okay, what does that transition process look like? And he was supportive of whatever capacity he needed to be available to, for that handover of him in his departure. And we took it upon ourselves as a challenge to say, well, okay, well, if we don’t have clean singing, how can we find melody in our voices as the remaining members, but as well as in the guitars and in other ways. And also maybe there’s melody to a degree, but maybe we find it more in the anthemic catchiness of heavy vocals.

So it’s always a part of this new challenge and it was a fire up underneath our butts that needed to be lit because I feel perhaps we were getting, not complacent, but we were used to going, okay, we’ve done that. Let’s flip to the clean part now. And this constant ping pong thing can be like a crutch and we can get lazy with it.

‘We wouldn’t just replace. It needs to be something different than, not better than, but just different. So we’re not in a rush, which is good. We’ve got enough material to do a full set, if not more, without any singing.’

The album sets down with Transmission (The Sun), a musical throwback which closes the chapter on the dual album concept, Kyle’s time and nod to whatever the next chapter holds for In Hearts Wake.

‘It is an end of a chapter, if you will, because this diary entry that we will never hear more of from us of that period, going through what we were going through. But look, it does show what we can do with the four piece that we are. We can go to that place of old school and it does have a throwback feel. I agree. We all felt that, but it didn’t feel outdated in a sense that it didn’t feel real to us. It really felt, or at least to me, it felt really on the pulse of what I was feeling. So it felt very ‘of the now’, even though there was some throwbacky kind of guitar licks and things like that. But I think it’s just an exploration again of what can we do as a four piece without singing.‘

Interview By Iain McCallum

In Hearts Wake New Album Incarnation is out on Friday 12 July via UNFD…

On tour on the following dates, tickets HERE…