In the first decade of the 21st century, when there was a lot of weight being thrown behind the burgeoning “southern sludge” movement, Little Rock’s Rwake (pronounced “wake”) tore off an all-time run of kaleidoscopic, progressive doom metal albums. They were sometimes lumped in with the Savannah circle of bands – Baroness, Kylesa, Black Tusk – but their freewheeling, cosmic sound always felt a little wilder than what their Georgian contemporaries were doing at the time. Rwake’s sophomore album, 2002’s Hell Is A Door To The Sun, was their first masterpiece, an unhinged blend of proggy songcraft, psychedelic exploration, harrowing backwoods atmospherics, and good ol’ southern choogle. Songs like the furious “Unleashing Cosmic Destruction” and the meandering “The Stoner Tree” showcased the band’s awesome range, and the double-headed demon of co-vocalists Chris “CT” Terry and Brittany Fugate served as a breath of fresh air in a scene where workmanlike, monosyllabic grunts were the norm.

In 2004, the same year Mastodon released Leviathan, Rwake returned with If You Walk Before You Crawl You Crawl Before You Die. That album finds the band venturing even further off the beaten path. Its songs feel diseased, somehow — mired in darkness and choked out by briar thorns and hissing ambient noise. 2007’s Voices Of Omens was at least a partial reemergence into the light, and it remains Rwake’s most successful marriage of songs and production. The band’s clarity of purpose meshed perfectly with the clarity of sound captured by engineer Sanford Parker. The lineup of CT, Fugate on vocals and keys, drummer and primary songwriter Jeff Morgan, guitarists Kris “Gravy” Graves and Kiffin Rogers, and bassist Reid Raley also seemed to be working in more perfect lockstep, having all returned from the If You Walk album. Voices Of Omens still feels like a miracle to me. It’s one of my favorite albums of the 2000s.

Voices Of Omens was also the first album I ever listened to on a pair of high-quality headphones. I remember coming home from FYE – they were in malls, look it up – with the CD and my first pair of Sennheisers. I spent weeks peeling back the seemingly infinite layers of musical information the band had managed to embed in songs like “The Finality” and “Leviticus.” For months, my message-board signature – it was a little line of text under your posts, look it up – was a lyric from “Crooked Rivers” that I loved: “Fused in liquid lead with no crosses for the dead.” Like Rwake themselves, that line struck me as concrete but elusive, cryptic yet seeming to contain the universe. Four years later, in 2011, Rwake would release Rest, a behemoth of an album anchored by a few of the longest songs they’d ever written. It would be their last album for 14 years.

“Most of us are all-or-nothing people, and so we felt like it was unfair – not just to the music, but to [the band] in general – if we couldn’t fully, 100% devote ourselves to what we were doing,” Fugate says of the long layoff. “We just personally didn’t have the time in our lives to devote to what the music needed, and so, being all-or-nothing people, we ended up with a lot of nothing.”

“We just took our time to really focus on our families and our kids,” Morgan adds. “We just nested up. And we continued playing music in other projects, and we dabbled with the Rwake stuff, as well, during that time. But we really just took some time, because we toured heavy, and we made this our lives for a long time.”

Morgan is right to note that Rwake never actually broke up. During the 14 years between Rest and their new album, The Return Of Magik, the band played a few dozen shows, mostly in Arkansas. Morgan and CT also kept their collaborative fire burning, playing together in the black metal project Ash Of Cedars and the doom band Deadbird. Nobody in Rwake ever used the word “hiatus” — the band just wasn’t actively working on new music. For Morgan, the faucet never totally turned off. The oldest material on The Return Of Magik dates to a series of demos he made in 2018.

“I started receiving transmissions,” Morgan explains. “I started just hearing this music, and I was racing to the guitar and the microphone, trying to record it and capture it. Even if it was like voice memos on my phone, I was just trying to capture this music that was clearly Rwake, that was just showing up in my head. And in 2018, we hadn’t been doing anything in a while, so I was a little puzzled as to what was happening, and what could be done with it. Since we weren’t very active, we weren’t communicating as much. We kind of sent it back and forth, and everyone was in agreement, like, ‘This is clearly Rwake stuff.’ We weren’t synchronized enough at that time to get in the room. But then, when COVID happened, that’s when the endless band thread started.”

The Rwake that appears on The Return Of Magik looks a little different than the one that went quiet after the release of Rest. Gravy and Rogers declined to return, leaving the band without any guitarists going into rehearsals. Former touring bassist (and childhood friend) John Judkins stepped up in their stead, as did Morgan’s former guitar-store coworker and Cynic superfan Austin Sublett. Rwake functions as an egalitarian collective. Morgan brings in the initial skeletons, but they don’t become Rwake songs until everyone has their fingers on them. Judkins, who plays lap and pedal steel on the record, and Sublett, who shreds its tastiest leads, were immediately welcomed into that process.

“We’re really fortunate that we have a lot of trust in each other,” Fugate says. “When someone else brings something to the table, we trust them, to give them that room to breathe and to do that. That’s an important part.”

“All of the development that we did for this new record, I think, is what makes it so spiritual sounding,” Morgan concurs. “It’s such a ceremony. It really just takes you away, and you don’t know what’s happening. It’s a trance. And I feel like most of that is from how we were able to develop it.”

Rwake recorded The Return Of Magik with their longtime producer Sanford Parker at East End Sound in Hensley, Arkansas (pop. 139), about 20 minutes outside of Little Rock. The studio itself may have also contributed to the spiritual – or, more accurately, haunted – qualities of the record that Morgan alludes to. He says that East End was “discovered, almost archaeologically,” decades after it was originally built by the famous pedal steel player Zane Beck. If an abandoned recording studio in the Arkansas woods sounds like something you might encounter in a Rwake song, you’re not far off.

“[Beck] was from Arkansas, and he built his dream studio [in Hensley] in 1984,” Morgan explains. “It was built. It was ready to go. He had 2-inch tape machine in there. It was this amazing studio, and then he passed away a year later, in 1985. And so the place just sat. They had an engineer that would do sessions there throughout the ’80s, and [Beck’s] wife lived on the property. The drainage is weird, and so it just completely flooded the studio, and they just sealed it up. And it became this Last Of Us, black mold-looking building. A guy that we know, he met the person who bought the property after the flood, and the guy was like, ‘Hey, I think there’s a studio or something in the back of this property I bought. Do you want to come check it out?’ And so they opened it up, and they found this amazing museum-like setting. It was all gross from being locked up, but they were able to pull the floors out, redo the floors. They completely built it. I’ve been in there digging, too, and we were finding pictures of ZZ Top, and all this crazy history. To do it there was really special, in a creepy, weird, old, haunted studio in the middle of Arkansas.”

Even after a 14-year layoff, and with two new members to integrate, Morgan and Fugate say the recording of The Return Of Magik felt easy and intuitive. They were doing it close to home, with a trusted producer, and two-thirds of the band have been playing together for 25 years. The music, taken from Morgan’s initial demos from 2018 as well as a second batch of songs he wrote in 2021, was rehearsed and ready when they entered the studio. The only real complication came when they were trying to pin down the notoriously eccentric Black Oak Arkansas frontman Jim “Dandy” Mangrum, whose William S. Burroughs-esque spoken word part at the beginning of “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration” gives the record one of its most striking moments. Its origin story is more than worthy of the legend of Jim Dandy.

“Years ago, CT was helping film a Black Oak Arkansas documentary,” Morgan says. “Him and some friends were working with the camera crews and stuff. We’d known each other before that, and we’d run into each other here and there, and we formed a friendly relationship with Jim and the other members of Black Oak at that time. But when CT started working on that documentary, him and Jim got really close. And so Jim actually wrote this poem and gave it specifically to CT, and was like, ‘This is for you. It’s called ‘Psychedelic Incarceration.’ So CT told us, ‘Hey, Jim wrote this poem for me, and we need to record him saying it.’ Because anyone who knows anything about Jim Dandy knows that when he speaks, it’s like, the rock n’ roll preacher is at the podium, and everyone has to witness what’s happening.”

That poem existed long before there was a Rwake song to absorb it. Dandy wrote it in 2013, but without any imminent recording plans for the band, CT and Morgan put it on the back burner and almost forgot about it. But when Morgan eventually started receiving the cosmic transmissions that would become The Return Of Magik demos, he started hearing Dandy’s voice in his head.

“As soon as that song came, I could hear Jim’s voice on there,” he says. “On the demo version, I could just hear it. I was like, ‘We’ve got to get this poem from Jim.’ So when we were in the studio, we were calling him and leaving messages, like, ‘Please, Jim, let us come over!'”

Rwake didn’t hear back from Dandy while they were at East End. The recording sessions wrapped, everybody went home, and they almost moved on from the idea of having him on the record. Weeks later, when the band was deep into the mixing process, well — Jim Dandy to the rescue.

“CT sent a text that was like, ‘Jim’s house. Saturday,'” Morgan recalls. “So we loaded up, we went to his house, took a bunch of gear, miked him up, and we just hung out with him all day. I think we were there for, like, six or seven or eight hours. Who knows? Time doesn’t exist when you’re in Jim Dandy’s house. He just told us the most amazing stories about John Lennon, and it was unbelievable what a day it was. And we ended up getting the poem recorded.”

Dandy’s poem is just one highlight among many on The Return Of Magik, a comeback album that’s, improbably, well worth the 14-year wait. “You Swore We’d Always Be Together” is a mutant power ballad, reintroducing the band after their long nap with volleys of warped acoustic guitar and gut-wrenching emotional tumult. The title track and “With Stardust Flowers” emphasize the ritualistic, sacred qualities at the album’s core, with CT in full-on bug-eyed country preacher mode for most of their marathon runtimes. “Distant Constellations And The Psychedelic Incarceration” follows Dandy’s acid-casualty poem with a slow-build crescendo that resolves in a bout of twisty, tech-y riffage. Even “Φ,” a sub-two-minute studio improv piece for guitar and piano, seems to hum with the frisson of the band’s renewed collaboration. Fugate says it’s her favorite part of the record.

“When you take a step back, and you take a break like that, you realize what’s really important to you,” she says. “And I think we all realized that playing music together as a band was really important for all of us. We decided that we were going to make time in our lives to dedicate to working on Rwake stuff again as a unit, all together.”

TEN NAILS THROUGH THE NECK

JOURNEY TO THE WORLD BEYOND