In Hearts Wake Share 5 Little Known Facts About 'Incarnation'

In Hearts Wake have just exploded into their new era with the arrival of sixth studio LP, Incarnation. Not only does the record mark the Genesis of the Byron Bay metalcore heavyweights’ fresh chapter as a four-piece (following the departure of their long-time bassist and clean vocalist Kyle Erich), it also poetically forms a conceptual bookend to their beloved debut album, Divination.

Now, to toast the arrival of the LP and a forthcoming Australian tour in its honour (where fans will be able to bid one final live farewell to Kyle – dates down below), Music Feeds has enlisted IHW frontman Jake Taylor to run us through 5 little known facts about the making of Incarnation. From bumping into Parkway Drive frontman Winston McCall in the middle of a community disaster relief effort, to recruiting Voldemort’s actual snake from the Harry Potter movie franchise for a film clip, to using cow jaw bones as percussion instruments, you can get the full lowdown, direct from Jake, down below.

In Hearts Wake – ‘The Flood (ǝɔᴉʇsnɾ)’ Ft. Winston McCall

1. The Return of Winston McCall

‘The Flood (ǝɔᴉʇsnɾ)’ features Winston McCall from Parkway Drive. It’s his second feature on an In Hearts Wake song, he’d previously appeared on Divination, and this time he reprises his role for the sequel, Incarnation. But aside from that obvious justification, getting Winston on the track was really organic. The title of ‘The Flood (ǝɔᴉʇsnɾ)’ is from an event that happened here in the Northern Rivers. The land that I’m actually looking at right now where we live was underwater, and the town of Lismore, which is further down the river, went two stories underwater.

My dad works in Lismore, he works as a carer, and he was in a house caring one night. And at the time it was like,” oh yeah, there might be a flood tonight, and it might come over the road”. But then it just kept rising to the point where he had the cat, he had the lady in the house, they were all in the second story. Next minute, the water’s coming up the stairs. It was a slow rise, it happened over three or four hours. And then next minute, he jumps out of a second story window onto a mattress, and he’s floating down the Lismore River. I’ve laughed about it to be honest, it sounds unreal that it could’ve happened.

During the cleanup that followed, I was out there with In Hearts Wake, and we were doing cleanups, helping out, just basically stripping houses because all the stuff was completely gone and the government at the time wasn’t there to help. So it was a community- led thing. While I was there, I bumped into Winston on the street while he was doing supply runs, and we had a minute of just saying that we just couldn’t believe what we were seeing. But the flip-side was how incredible it was that this was a completely people- and community-run clean up. It was all the people, there was no government involved. And it was amazing at how it was functioning and working, fully volunteer-based.

When we wrote a song called ‘The Flood’, I never thought, “oh, Winston’s going to be on this song”. We’d written the song about the flood, and it felt really important to us. And then we sort of coloured in the missing pieces and realised Winston’s voice would go well here. I called Winston. And Winston being Winston, he doesn’t just say yes, he’s very much, “thanks and I’m honoured. Send it to me first, and if I’m meant to be on it, I’ll let you know”.

I sent him the link, and the song goes for a bit over three minutes. It hadn’t been a minute after I sent it, and he just texted me, “yeah, I’m in”. I was really honoured that he felt a true calling to be on the song rather than just feeling like he should do it.

Winston came into the studio about a week later and we workshopped the song, he was in there playing in the sandpit for hours. We were trying things, and it was probably the best and most enjoyable collaboration I’ve ever been a part of. And that then followed into us doing a film clip together. He was very generous with his time and just a really good guy to work with.

It feels really good when anyone is genuinely wanting to be part of a piece of art that speaks to them rather than feeling like they should. And that’s what you want all the time. You never want anyone to feel like they should or that they “have” to do something. It’s always going to be like,”yep, I’m in, this is right”.

When Winston was on the set for the music video, someone asked him, “how many film clips have you done with other bands?”. And he’s like, “this is the first I’ve actually ever done without Parkway”. And it was like, “oh, cool. Well this is the perfect!”. It felt like a real honouring of the story that we were telling for him to actually do that. Not that he’s some big mythic guy, but he’s very time-poor in the sense of everything he has going on. And we filmed in an old flooded house for a lot of those scenes, so it was all very real and in keeping with what the song is about.

2. The Michigan Massive

Towards the end of being in the studio for Incarnation, we didn’t actually know the exact 11 tracks for the album. We had a couple of ideas for the back end of the album, but they weren’t fully fleshed out as to what Tarot card they might be part of.

At the time, we had this opportunity where there was a show happening down the road from where we were recording, which happened to have at least two to three of Michigan’s most notable bands playing at the venue. They invited us to come along, and before the gig we had this conversation together, like, “what if we got all the Michigan bands that we know, not just because they’ve been so kind to us, but what if we really amplified those artists because they’re like family at this point?”. And then it became: “if we did it, how would we get them all in the same room?”. Because as we all know with artists, it’s like herding cats. You can’t get ’em together. But we got everyone over that night after the show, you’ve got the dudes from King 810, the dudes from Heartsick and For The Fallen Dreams. There were some other bands that were just around, I think it was 20 or 30 people, it was chaos. We had the music playing on loop, and it was like, “okay, we’re writing parts. Anything you get, if you got it, you walk into the booth and you just track it. Don’t overthink it”. And this is at like two in the morning, trying to speed-write, walking into that room and laying stuff down. What we heard the next day was an absolute mess; but there were some core ideas which we were able to go, “that’s good, that’s good, that’s shit, that’s shit” and so on. And then we got those core ideas and we went, “all right, Chad [Ruhlig], come back” and so on. We basically got people back in to build their part in their own time. And thus we created this song called ‘Michigama (uɐᴉɔᴉƃɐɯ ǝɥʇ)’, which is an ode to the strength and resilience of people who fight through the bitterest winter to make music and survive.

Those people on that track literally rented us their cars. Don, who’s at the very end of the track, he’s the father-in-law of Josh [Schroeder], who we recorded with. Don put us up in his basement for all five recording sessions. He’s like 70-something and he’s the sweetest man. So we’ve got everyone on there! David [Gunn] was on there too because he’s been taking us out to dinners being like, “no, you guys are guests. I’m taking you out to dinner. You need a good meal!”. It’s like, “fuck, we’re putting you on the song, dude”. So that’s ‘Michigama’, which roughly translates to the “great lake”.

3. In-House Halo

We referenced “Killing Frenzy” from Halo on Divination, and “Killionaire” appeared somewhere else. Now the funny thing is: from what I understand, you can’t just go and sample something directly and put it in your song because that’s copyright infringement unless you get written permission. So we’ve had someone do voice overs for these parts that reference Halo – and that person is Josh Schroeder, who we’ve recorded our albums with. He’s got a deep voice. While we were recording Incarnation, Josh gets in the vocal booth and says [mimicking Halo voiceover] “Slayer”. And you’ll hear it in a song called ‘Tyrant (ɹoɹǝdɯǝ ǝɥʇ)’.

When we first heard ‘Tyrant’, there’s a video we posted of Josh doing the voice over. And I remember playing it back and we were actually all going crazy at this point, but we all actually started moshing in the studio, which we never do to our own music. It sounds pretty cringe, but it was just fun and it just scratches an itch. So for those who don’t know, that’s the man who we’ve recorded the album with. That’s Josh’s voice!

4. Harry Potter & The Snake Heartbeat

There’s a track already out called ‘Orphan (lᴉʌǝp ǝɥʇ)’, it’s one of the album’s singles. When we were originally writing ‘Orphan’, it was pure chaos instrumentally. Things were going everywhere and it was hard to make sense of it; but it had a feeling. And that feeling was basically psychosis, it’s just psychotic in nature. From my experience, without getting too much into politics, let’s look at what’s happening across the world with who is currently going head-to-head. I’m not picking sides, but it’s just one big psychotic event of reality TV that you couldn’t script. We’re all watching, biting our nails on the edge of our seats, and it feels like the whole system is kind of eating its own tail. We’ve got a felon, and they’re both elderly, but they’re going head-to-head to be run the most powerful country in the world in this psychotic nature.

“The snake that eats its own tail” really leant into: what does that systemic serpent look like in a song and how can we bring it to life energetically? So I had this idea, I’ve heard it before on the internet, and it was a snake’s heartbeat. The sound of a snake’s heartbeat has got a really different cadence, it sounds like it’s almost in the ocean. So on ‘Orphan’, we sampled a snake’s heartbeat and put it at the start and the end to give you this feeling of the psychotic adrenaline that’s coming on. And throughout the song, there’s constant references to the snake, “bit by the fangs, the serpents game in a world that’s so deranged”.

When it came time for the film clip, naturally it was like, “hey, we need a snake who’s available in Brisbane”. We put a post out to get a snake in. And this guy writes back saying, “yeah, I’m a reptile wrangler, I’ve got a snake here. Here’s the resume”. We look at the resume and the snake literally did the motion capture in the Harry Potter films for Voldemort’s snake Nagini. There I am on set, and she’s a 40-year-old python, and the weight of her…she was so heavy, she’s massive. And I got to do all of these scenes just being that psychotic devil. I just emulated that with this beautiful snake. The snake thing coming full circle was just really cool and it got to the core of that song.

5. Hollow (Actual) Bone

Lastly, we recorded the sound of actual bones on ‘Hollow Bone (plɹoʍ ǝɥʇ)’. The meaning behind ‘Hollow Bone (plɹoʍ ǝɥʇ)’ is: if you want to be effective at something in life, there’s this saying that it’s not about you, it has to be about something in service. If your ego is involved, if you’re doing it for personal gain or desire – it’s not going to happen in the right way. It’ll happen in a different way where it’s tyrannical and unbalanced and it doesn’t serve anyone. So being a hollow bone is essentially: you have to be fully in service where there’s no marrow, so to speak. The marrow is the energy of service that comes through where you are that strong bridge for the energy to take place. It doesn’t have to get spiritual or be about religion, because it’s outside of that. When we were taking on this idea of not having Kyle [Erich] and that we had to deliver something that felt like it was the spirit of the band that was beyond us, there was a desire to also want to create music for fans. And to not necessarily keep living our dream, but be living the dream of what the band was about, which is always being in service, not just to fans but to the earth trying to make a difference.

We sort of stepped into that place and wrote this song, and a lot of the bone elements started to take shape. We’ve seen kegs being hit by Slipknot – but what about the percussion of actual bones? That conversation was met with me walking on the land where I am right now, and I found these cow jawbones. We don’t have cattle here, they must’ve been from 50+ years ago. So we got those actual bones, and we were in the studio when we’re writing the song and we sampled those bones being hit. And we were able to make different instruments out of them by pitching them high and low. We’ve got a whole section in the song where we’re playing those bones. And they’re not Kyle’s bones, someone laughed about that and made a joke, the death of a member; but there was definitely a transformation of the death of something to bring on something new.