In Hearts Wake: Five Key Influences Behind 'Incarnation'

  • In Hearts Wake: Five Key Influences Behind 'Incarnation'
    POSTED
    By Brenton Harris

    In Hearts Wake - Photo Credit - Daniel Anderson
    In Hearts Wake will release their sixth full-length Incarnation on Friday 12 July via UNFD. Incarnation sees the Byron Bay metalcore monsters continuing to evolve the scope of both their sound and their vision. 

    Previewed by the singles Orphan (lᴉʌǝp ǝɥʇ) and Hollow Bone (plɹoʍ ǝɥʇ), Incarnation is the hotly-anticipated follow-up to 2020's Kaliyuga, which debuted at #3 on the ARIA Album Charts.  Equally a powerful yet poignant step forward for the band. 

    Speaking on the upcoming album, vocalist Jake Taylor recently shared that “Incarnation is the shadow counterpart and sequel to the band's debut album Divination , with each song inspired by the meaning and ideas of a particular Major Arcana Tarot card. There are 22 Major Arcana Tarot cards in every deck and 11 tracks on each record, bringing the vision to completion 12 years later. But much like a coin with two sides, cards flipped upside down deliver the reversed meaning, polarised in every way, explores the Incarnation dark underbelly to mirror and stand diametrically opposite to Divination .”

    Ahead of Incarnation's arrival, we caught up with Taylor, who filled us in on the five key influences that led to the creation of the record. It's an eclectic list incorporating everything from the aforementioned Tarot to video games to pop culture emperors, Boston hardcore bands and real-world reflections. 



    5 Key Influences Behind Incarnation with Jake Taylor of In Hearts Wake

    The Tarot Deck

    I have to mention the tarot deck for sure because that really creatively impacted the end result with only 11 cards remaining for Incarnation. Having done the first part 12 years ago with Divination, it meant we were boxed into knowing what cards had to be created for Incarnation. Initially, we could write anything because we figured that one of these final 11 would fit. But as we started to get towards the back end of the album, we had to be much more specific knowing, “okay, we're missing the Temperance card here, so lyrically we're going to have to work with that”. We had all 11 of the tarot cards stuck on the ceiling and we'd sometimes pull a card down and put it front and centre when we were working directly on that song. And if we got stuck on lyrics or we got stuck on anything at all, we'd look at the card and maybe describe a piece of the card in an Easter egg way and not be so on the nose. But you will notice that in some of the songs if you look carefully. 

    Because we specifically were looking at the cards and writing meanings to the cards, we started to realise that there's always the positive and negative meaning of the card. It became, “wow, each card's meaning relating to the song isn't actually in the positive way that the card's intending. It's actually in the negative”. And I don't like to use the word negative, I actually prefer to use the word shadow because the shadows actually point us towards finding the truth of something. For example, if you're an alcoholic, you're in excess of something. Whilst it can be negative and detrimental to the body, it can actually be a great teacher to realise and to step towards health. You can be in excess of something, or too much of something can be in the shadow of something. And so as we got through, we realised, “wow, these are all upside down. They're all inverted”. So, we made the choice to have all the tarot cards on each song be flipped upside down.

    For the song titles, it was a cool discovery using Google, “hey Google, can I write text upside down?” because that’s what the card is? And it gave us that, spat all the card names back upside down. And we also discovered you can actually have that text on Spotify, it'll still appear upside down. So that's the meaning behind why all the cards are upside down in the song titles.

    Beauty and the Breakdown - Bury Your Dead (2006)

    As far as an influential artist goes, one of the records that we all love and have loved since we were 16 years old is Bury Your Dead by Beauty and the Breakdown. If you went on Spotify now, it's probably got no plays on it because it was in the age of CDs. But when that came out, it was the first heavy band that we had ever heard that sounded, not techno, but they brought a level of production into it where it sounded like electronic hardcore, or well-produced hardcore I guess you'd say. For us it was like, “whoa, this is opening up a whole new world of what you can do in the world of hardcore”. We love how catchy the vocals are because of the quick rappy phrasing. We nodded to Bury Your Dead a couple of times, not directly copying, but it influenced a few parts on this record. You may notice it in the song Tyrant (ɹoɹǝdɯǝ ǝɥʇ) in particular, there's a part in there. If you know, you’ll know, and that's sort of our ode to a great band.

    Pop Culture Emperors

    On the topic of Tyrant (ɹoɹǝdɯǝ ǝɥʇ), that tyrant is the Emperor card upside down. I can't think of any positive emperors to be honest in modern pop culture. And also in reality, there are always dictators and tyrants. So whether it's the Emperor in Dune, the Emperor in Star Wars, I'm not going to name countries, but people can fill in the gaps…for this song, I thought, “who is the character beyond the tarot card”, it’s a red robed figure on this throne, which we make direct mention of in the song. But the person and the figure, or the character that I really had in mind was…it's a nerdy ass name, but his name's Denethor. I just remember this guy in Lord of the Rings, in The Return of the King, he's a guy that's eating all this greasy chicken in one scene. And he's not the rightful king of Gondor, he's just the guy that's sitting there. He's basically declared himself the steward or the ruler, but he's not ruling with his heart. He sends his sons off to murder basically in the name of war while he's eating greasy chicken and slobbering all over his hands and being a pig. Sitting there with little withered fingers and dirty nails, pure greed and gluttony. Is that who you want on the throne? Not really.  So that is the sort of the character that we had envisioned for that song and influenced Tyrant. 

    Cyberpunk 2077

    For the song called Gen Doom (ʇuɐɥdoɹǝᴉɥ ǝɥʇ), it's a futuristic post-apocalyptic picture, and it was the music that really sent us to that world. Josh [Schroeder] and I were working on building the lyrical world to it, and we heard the music that Ben [Nairne] and Eaven [Dall] had written in the other room. There was so much electronica, and steel and mechanical kind of sounds, it was very, very futuristic with all this tech. Josh was playing a video game at the time called Cyberpunk 2077, which I knew nothing about, but we did a whole deep dive into it. Keanu Reeves did voice overs in it, and we were looking at the world we’re in, we're running around as the character. It’s set in a dystopian city, and for Gen Doom that was the world we chose to write in and to colour in. It had a touch of Terminator to it, where people are half steel, half chrome, and where tech has almost come in so much that there's not much humanness left. There’s no judgement around these things. But with AI and with the amount of tech and how much we're advancing as a race, it felt very appropriate to write what this world might be like. 

    Real World Reflections

    The last influence is a pretty sombre note to end on, but we're going to do it anyway, it’s for the song Transmission (uns ǝɥʇ), which is the final song on Incarnation. At the time, as far as the whole musical body of the record, it felt like there was a lot of powerful stuff…but there was an element of heart we needed. It's not that the rest of it's all in the head, but there was already the psychotic nature of Orphan (lᴉʌǝp ǝɥʇ) and The Flood (ǝɔᴉʇsnɾ), which is very energetic, relentless, and very heady. We felt like there was this piece, not missing, but this opportunity to tell something, to tell a story that was much more sensitive and emotional. We can explore that in softer songs and so we thought, “how could we do that in a heavy sense?”.

    We had this beautiful piece of music that was written for Transmission (uns ǝɥʇ), and it had so much melody, it had so much heart. The chorus that I wrote for it took about 30 seconds to a minute, and suddenly there were the words, there was the phrasing. That's probably the quickest we’ve ever had the final product be what it was at the start. It was almost like this thing was coming through as a transmission, if you will, of the story that needed to be told. And that coincided with my best friend Eka [Darville], one of my best friends who was on the Traveller (The Fool) film clip. He's in our first debut film clip, it was our breakout song and our first proper music video. Eka’s an actor, and he's Jamaican Australian, he's got a really striking look. And Eka was part of launching the band in a huge way. He went on to be in Planet of the Apes, he's on Vampire Diaries, he was in Spartacus, he's in all these big shows and he lives in America now. And so I'm over there at the same time making this song, and Eka informs me that his eldest son, who he literally had the year after he was in that Traveller film clip, has just passed away from a really rare brain tumour. Eka was just talking to me in this space of death, having lost his son, of how much he was learning through the process in a really mature way. He was very upset, but he said about his son Mana: “Mana just opened me up to what life is beyond death and what life is about. And I feel so grateful to be going through this experience with the people around me”. And so I poured that conversation that I had with Eka into this song as sort of my way of, “how do you reach out to the people that are lost and people that are gone?”. It all came out in Transmission. I wasn't able to be there for the funeral, I was in Michigan and the funeral was in L.A., so there I am in the studio while that was happening. Transmission just came through and it was like, “this has to be on the album as the end of the record”.

    Incarnation will be released on July 12 via UNFD.
     


    Incarnation 
    01. Spitting Nails (ǝunʇɹoɟ ɟo lǝǝɥʍ)
    02. Hollow Bone (plɹoʍ ǝɥʇ)
    03. The Flood (ǝɔᴉʇsnɾ) [Feat. Winston McCall of Parkway Drive]
    04. Orphan (lᴉʌǝp ǝɥʇ)
    05. Gen Doom (ʇuɐɥdoɹǝᴉɥ ǝɥʇ)
    06. Shishigami シシ神 (ssǝɹdɯǝ ǝɥʇ) [Feat. Katio Nagai of Paledusk]
    07.Tyrant (ɹoɹǝdɯǝ ǝɥʇ)
    08. Feeding The Dead (ǝɔuɐɹǝdɯǝʇ)
    09. Michigama (uɐᴉɔᴉƃɐɯ ǝɥʇ) [Feat. Chad Ruhlig of For The Fallen Dreams, David Gunn of King 810, Alfonso Civile of Heartsick, Don]
    10. Shellshock (ssǝʇsǝᴉɹd ɥƃᴉɥ ǝɥʇ) [Feat. Garret Rapp of The Color Morale]
    11. Transmission (uns ǝɥʇ)



    In Hearts Wake 
    Incarnation Australia Tour 2024
    With Special Guests
    Paleface Swiss (Switzerland)
    King 810 (USA)
    Gravemind

    Thursday 5 September - King Street Bandroom, Newcastle 18+
    Friday 6 September - Liberty Hall, Sydney 18+
    Saturday 7 September - The Tivoli, Brisbane 18+
    Thursday 12 September - The Forum, Melbourne 18+
    Friday 13 September - The Gov, Adelaide 18+
    Saturday 14 September - Magnet House, Perth 18+

    Shop for Metalcore Merch 
    Show Me Your God Hoodie Black
     

    Listen To Our Metal Maniacs Playlist
     

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In Hearts Wake - Photo Credit - Daniel Anderson
In Hearts Wake will release their sixth full-length Incarnation on Friday 12 July via UNFD. Incarnation sees the Byron Bay metalcore monsters continuing to evolve the scope of both their sound and their vision. 

Previewed by the singles Orphan (lᴉʌǝp ǝɥʇ) and Hollow Bone (plɹoʍ ǝɥʇ), Incarnation is the hotly-anticipated follow-up to 2020's Kaliyuga, which debuted at #3 on the ARIA Album Charts.  Equally a powerful yet poignant step forward for the band. 

Speaking on the upcoming album, vocalist Jake Taylor recently shared that “Incarnation is the shadow counterpart and sequel to the band's debut album Divination , with each song inspired by the meaning and ideas of a particular Major Arcana Tarot card. There are 22 Major Arcana Tarot cards in every deck and 11 tracks on each record, bringing the vision to completion 12 years later. But much like a coin with two sides, cards flipped upside down deliver the reversed meaning, polarised in every way, explores the Incarnation dark underbelly to mirror and stand diametrically opposite to Divination .”

Ahead of Incarnation's arrival, we caught up with Taylor, who filled us in on the five key influences that led to the creation of the record. It's an eclectic list incorporating everything from the aforementioned Tarot to video games to pop culture emperors, Boston hardcore bands and real-world reflections. 



5 Key Influences Behind Incarnation with Jake Taylor of In Hearts Wake

The Tarot Deck

I have to mention the tarot deck for sure because that really creatively impacted the end result with only 11 cards remaining for Incarnation. Having done the first part 12 years ago with Divination, it meant we were boxed into knowing what cards had to be created for Incarnation. Initially, we could write anything because we figured that one of these final 11 would fit. But as we started to get towards the back end of the album, we had to be much more specific knowing, “okay, we're missing the Temperance card here, so lyrically we're going to have to work with that”. We had all 11 of the tarot cards stuck on the ceiling and we'd sometimes pull a card down and put it front and centre when we were working directly on that song. And if we got stuck on lyrics or we got stuck on anything at all, we'd look at the card and maybe describe a piece of the card in an Easter egg way and not be so on the nose. But you will notice that in some of the songs if you look carefully. 

Because we specifically were looking at the cards and writing meanings to the cards, we started to realise that there's always the positive and negative meaning of the card. It became, “wow, each card's meaning relating to the song isn't actually in the positive way that the card's intending. It's actually in the negative”. And I don't like to use the word negative, I actually prefer to use the word shadow because the shadows actually point us towards finding the truth of something. For example, if you're an alcoholic, you're in excess of something. Whilst it can be negative and detrimental to the body, it can actually be a great teacher to realise and to step towards health. You can be in excess of something, or too much of something can be in the shadow of something. And so as we got through, we realised, “wow, these are all upside down. They're all inverted”. So, we made the choice to have all the tarot cards on each song be flipped upside down.

For the song titles, it was a cool discovery using Google, “hey Google, can I write text upside down?” because that’s what the card is? And it gave us that, spat all the card names back upside down. And we also discovered you can actually have that text on Spotify, it'll still appear upside down. So that's the meaning behind why all the cards are upside down in the song titles.

Beauty and the Breakdown - Bury Your Dead (2006)

As far as an influential artist goes, one of the records that we all love and have loved since we were 16 years old is Bury Your Dead by Beauty and the Breakdown. If you went on Spotify now, it's probably got no plays on it because it was in the age of CDs. But when that came out, it was the first heavy band that we had ever heard that sounded, not techno, but they brought a level of production into it where it sounded like electronic hardcore, or well-produced hardcore I guess you'd say. For us it was like, “whoa, this is opening up a whole new world of what you can do in the world of hardcore”. We love how catchy the vocals are because of the quick rappy phrasing. We nodded to Bury Your Dead a couple of times, not directly copying, but it influenced a few parts on this record. You may notice it in the song Tyrant (ɹoɹǝdɯǝ ǝɥʇ) in particular, there's a part in there. If you know, you’ll know, and that's sort of our ode to a great band.

Pop Culture Emperors

On the topic of Tyrant (ɹoɹǝdɯǝ ǝɥʇ), that tyrant is the Emperor card upside down. I can't think of any positive emperors to be honest in modern pop culture. And also in reality, there are always dictators and tyrants. So whether it's the Emperor in Dune, the Emperor in Star Wars, I'm not going to name countries, but people can fill in the gaps…for this song, I thought, “who is the character beyond the tarot card”, it’s a red robed figure on this throne, which we make direct mention of in the song. But the person and the figure, or the character that I really had in mind was…it's a nerdy ass name, but his name's Denethor. I just remember this guy in Lord of the Rings, in The Return of the King, he's a guy that's eating all this greasy chicken in one scene. And he's not the rightful king of Gondor, he's just the guy that's sitting there. He's basically declared himself the steward or the ruler, but he's not ruling with his heart. He sends his sons off to murder basically in the name of war while he's eating greasy chicken and slobbering all over his hands and being a pig. Sitting there with little withered fingers and dirty nails, pure greed and gluttony. Is that who you want on the throne? Not really.  So that is the sort of the character that we had envisioned for that song and influenced Tyrant. 

Cyberpunk 2077

For the song called Gen Doom (ʇuɐɥdoɹǝᴉɥ ǝɥʇ), it's a futuristic post-apocalyptic picture, and it was the music that really sent us to that world. Josh [Schroeder] and I were working on building the lyrical world to it, and we heard the music that Ben [Nairne] and Eaven [Dall] had written in the other room. There was so much electronica, and steel and mechanical kind of sounds, it was very, very futuristic with all this tech. Josh was playing a video game at the time called Cyberpunk 2077, which I knew nothing about, but we did a whole deep dive into it. Keanu Reeves did voice overs in it, and we were looking at the world we’re in, we're running around as the character. It’s set in a dystopian city, and for Gen Doom that was the world we chose to write in and to colour in. It had a touch of Terminator to it, where people are half steel, half chrome, and where tech has almost come in so much that there's not much humanness left. There’s no judgement around these things. But with AI and with the amount of tech and how much we're advancing as a race, it felt very appropriate to write what this world might be like. 

Real World Reflections

The last influence is a pretty sombre note to end on, but we're going to do it anyway, it’s for the song Transmission (uns ǝɥʇ), which is the final song on Incarnation. At the time, as far as the whole musical body of the record, it felt like there was a lot of powerful stuff…but there was an element of heart we needed. It's not that the rest of it's all in the head, but there was already the psychotic nature of Orphan (lᴉʌǝp ǝɥʇ) and The Flood (ǝɔᴉʇsnɾ), which is very energetic, relentless, and very heady. We felt like there was this piece, not missing, but this opportunity to tell something, to tell a story that was much more sensitive and emotional. We can explore that in softer songs and so we thought, “how could we do that in a heavy sense?”.

We had this beautiful piece of music that was written for Transmission (uns ǝɥʇ), and it had so much melody, it had so much heart. The chorus that I wrote for it took about 30 seconds to a minute, and suddenly there were the words, there was the phrasing. That's probably the quickest we’ve ever had the final product be what it was at the start. It was almost like this thing was coming through as a transmission, if you will, of the story that needed to be told. And that coincided with my best friend Eka [Darville], one of my best friends who was on the Traveller (The Fool) film clip. He's in our first debut film clip, it was our breakout song and our first proper music video. Eka’s an actor, and he's Jamaican Australian, he's got a really striking look. And Eka was part of launching the band in a huge way. He went on to be in Planet of the Apes, he's on Vampire Diaries, he was in Spartacus, he's in all these big shows and he lives in America now. And so I'm over there at the same time making this song, and Eka informs me that his eldest son, who he literally had the year after he was in that Traveller film clip, has just passed away from a really rare brain tumour. Eka was just talking to me in this space of death, having lost his son, of how much he was learning through the process in a really mature way. He was very upset, but he said about his son Mana: “Mana just opened me up to what life is beyond death and what life is about. And I feel so grateful to be going through this experience with the people around me”. And so I poured that conversation that I had with Eka into this song as sort of my way of, “how do you reach out to the people that are lost and people that are gone?”. It all came out in Transmission. I wasn't able to be there for the funeral, I was in Michigan and the funeral was in L.A., so there I am in the studio while that was happening. Transmission just came through and it was like, “this has to be on the album as the end of the record”.

Incarnation will be released on July 12 via UNFD.
 


Incarnation 
01. Spitting Nails (ǝunʇɹoɟ ɟo lǝǝɥʍ)
02. Hollow Bone (plɹoʍ ǝɥʇ)
03. The Flood (ǝɔᴉʇsnɾ) [Feat. Winston McCall of Parkway Drive]
04. Orphan (lᴉʌǝp ǝɥʇ)
05. Gen Doom (ʇuɐɥdoɹǝᴉɥ ǝɥʇ)
06. Shishigami シシ神 (ssǝɹdɯǝ ǝɥʇ) [Feat. Katio Nagai of Paledusk]
07.Tyrant (ɹoɹǝdɯǝ ǝɥʇ)
08. Feeding The Dead (ǝɔuɐɹǝdɯǝʇ)
09. Michigama (uɐᴉɔᴉƃɐɯ ǝɥʇ) [Feat. Chad Ruhlig of For The Fallen Dreams, David Gunn of King 810, Alfonso Civile of Heartsick, Don]
10. Shellshock (ssǝʇsǝᴉɹd ɥƃᴉɥ ǝɥʇ) [Feat. Garret Rapp of The Color Morale]
11. Transmission (uns ǝɥʇ)



In Hearts Wake 
Incarnation Australia Tour 2024
With Special Guests
Paleface Swiss (Switzerland)
King 810 (USA)
Gravemind

Thursday 5 September - King Street Bandroom, Newcastle 18+
Friday 6 September - Liberty Hall, Sydney 18+
Saturday 7 September - The Tivoli, Brisbane 18+
Thursday 12 September - The Forum, Melbourne 18+
Friday 13 September - The Gov, Adelaide 18+
Saturday 14 September - Magnet House, Perth 18+

Shop for Metalcore Merch 
Show Me Your God Hoodie Black
 

Listen To Our Metal Maniacs Playlist
 


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