The Band That Keeps Coming Back. The Country That Never Stopped Showing Up.
Thirteen years between albums. A fanbase in India that was ready before the band even knew it existed here. And a story that keeps getting bigger every time they come back.
Ian Kenny and the band doing what they do best
Drew Goddard did not expect an entire crowd to sing his songs back at him in Mumbai.
Karnivool had just finished their debut India headline show at IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo festival in 2011. And the crowd had known every word. Not some of the words. Every word. Of a niche Australian progressive metal band from Perth that had never played India before in their lives. Afterwards, Drew and the rest of the band went back to the hotel, opened some Kingfisher beers and watched the footage back. “Wait,” Drew said. “Did that actually just happen?”
It had. And it keeps happening every time they come back.
Karnivool formed in Perth, Western Australia in 1997 as a high school band playing Nirvana and Carcass covers at parties. The name came from being called “a bunch of clowns” around Perth, which the band found funny enough to keep. Ian Kenny stripped the lineup back to original songs in 1998, rebuilt around himself on vocals, Drew Goddard and Mark Hosking on guitars, Jon Stockman on bass and Steve Judd on drums. That lineup has not changed since 2004. Five people who have been making music together for over two decades, which is rare enough in any genre. In progressive rock, it is almost unheard of.
Their debut album Themata came out in 2005. Drew Goddard wrote every song on it. Tool comparisons arrived immediately, which is both accurate and reductive. Yes, there are polyrhythms. Yes, there are odd time signatures. Yes, Ian Kenny’s voice does things that feel almost architectural in the way they hold the music together. But Karnivool sounds like Karnivool. The guitar textures are different. The emotional register is different. There is a fragility inside the density that Tool rarely allows. It is music that is technically demanding and quietly devastating at the same time.
Sound Awake came out in 2009 and debuted at number two on the ARIA charts. It went Gold. It introduced them to the world. And it introduced India to them, or rather, it confirmed what India already suspected after finding Themata through word of mouth and progressive rock forums in the mid-2000s. By the time Karnivool played that Mumbai show in 2011, the Indian fanbase had been building quietly for six years without the band ever setting foot here.
That 2011 show started something. They came back in 2012 for the Bacardi NH7 Weekender in Pune. Back again in January 2015 for three festival appearances. Back in 2019 to headline the NH7 Weekender’s Meghalaya edition, where they debuted All It Takes live for the first time. Visit after visit across a decade and a half, each one confirming what Drew Goddard could not quite believe the first time.
The June 2024 visit was different from all the previous ones. Not a festival slot. Not a special appearance. Four standalone headline shows. Delhi NCR on June 5. Kolkata on June 7. Mumbai on June 8. Bengaluru on June 9. Their own stages, their own nights, their own audiences in four cities. Skillbox, who organised the tour, put it simply. “Karnivool has always been a fan favourite in India when it comes to progressive rock music. We felt the time was right for an extensive four-city headline tour.” It was only their fifth India visit but it was the first time they had come here entirely on their own terms.
And the timing had its own weight. By 2024, it had been eleven years since their last album. Asymmetry came out in 2013, debuted at number one on the ARIA charts, won the ARIA Award and then the band went quiet. Not absent. They toured, released a single called All It Takes in 2021, kept working. But no full album. Their fanbase waited. In India, as everywhere, they waited. Ian Kenny said in 2022: “I would love to say there’s a record to come. We’ve got one sitting there on the shelf. It’s just a matter of getting it together and making it tangible.” That album, In Verses, finally came out in February 2026, thirteen years after Asymmetry. Their fourth studio album. A new era, as the band described it, forged in the studio’s heat.
The 2024 tour came at a pivotal moment. A band on the cusp of something new, bringing their full catalogue to India on their own terms for the very first time. And the Indian fans in those four cities sang it all back, because that is what Indian Karnivool audiences do. They show up knowing the music. They have always shown up knowing the music.
That is the Karnivool India story in its truest form. A band from Perth that never expected to find a fanbase on the other side of the world, sitting in a hotel in Mumbai in 2011 with Kingfisher beers, watching footage of a crowd who had been quietly ready for them all along.
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