Yes, The Return of Magik is the first Rwake full-length since 2011’s Rest and yes, that’s an awfully long time. They toured for that record – it was their fifth – and have continued to perform on stage, mostly regionally in the Southeast as members have spread out from the band’s original home in Little Rock, Arkansas. But also, life.

Though comparatively quiet in decibels, these years feed into an album that ranges farther into a swirling, chasmic unknown than Rwake have ever gone. The band have grown, and the perspective of the material shifted accordingly. Families were started and built, homes and existences made beyond what founding drummer Jeff describes as the past experience of the band.

“This era is a little bit different,” says Jeff of now vs. then. “We’re able to make healthy decisions for the music. Part of it is just our age, how long we’ve been doing music, and how long we’ve been doing it together. We have a great internal dynamic that I think has made us more able to work together. We’re all very happy with where we are as far as the band goes, and personally in a lot of ways. We feel like this process is healthy for us. We’re not as distant mentally. The music, spiritually and mentally, is from the same distant place, but us personally, I don’t think we are as distant as we were back then.”

The Return of Magik was recorded in early 2024 at East End Sounds in Hensley, AR, renewing a long collaboration and sharing engineering/mixing duties with Sanford Parker (Minsk, Buried at Sea, Corrections House, et al). Mastered by Magnus Lindberg, it introduces lead guitarist Austin (also Coachlight) with a barrage of shredded solos suited to the angular, progressive metal riffing of the album’s most jaw-clenching moments, while likewise presenting a throughline of molten, immersive ambience.

Pieces like the opener “You Swore We’d Always Be Together” – already a fixture of live sets and a t-shirt – and the expansive, avant-grim sprawl of “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration” with its early spoken word written and performed by Jim "Dandy" Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas, or the title-track with its spit-forth declarative cosmic stream of consciousness soon met by the lysergic crush of “With Stardust Flowers,” move with cruelty and grace alike.

Arrangements carefully and thoughtfully built in layers over a period of years lend mystique and a feeling of building toward a cathartic release, and The Return of Magik’s songs become an individualized post-metallic blend of genre castigations. There is no box into which the material might fit other than one with the band’s name on it.

They remain dually fronted with the willfully obscure shouts of CT – who spent at least some of the time since Rest founding the annual Mutants of the Monster Micro-Fest, at which Rwake occasionally feature – and the throatrippingly visceral screams of Brittany, and so are at once familiar and refreshed in their purposes. Jeff (who plays acoustic guitar and 12-string bass in addition to drums), bassist/noisemaker Reid, Austin and fellow guitarist John (also 12-string bass, lap and pedal steel guitars) set an instrumental backdrop that is vast and engrossing in itself, and with interwoven acoustic guitar, Brittany’s Moog and regular trades between often-unsettling quiet meditations and full-on aural punishment, The Return of Magik answers the ferocity of the band’s accomplishments on records like 2007’s Voices of Omens (their Relapse debut and fourth LP) or 2004’s If You Walk Before You Crawl, You Crawl Before You Die (on At a Loss), without giving up the hard-won poise that maturity has wrought in their songcraft.

“We took about 10 years off,” Jeff explains. “In 2017, some stuff started showing up in my fingertips and in my brain that was clearly Rwake material. I started recording it. I think it was five songs total, and of course how we do it, it’s like 50 minutes long. It all happened in a month and a half. A song a week, basically. It was all very fast and it just ejected itself from my head.

“Everyone was liking it, but we were still in family-mode and we weren’t really active at that time. Then in 2020, when everybody was shut down, we got pretty good at file-sharing. I was sharing stuff with Deadbird, and the Mutants festival that CT does was online, so everybody was doing the virtual Mutants fest. With that, another spark came, and some more music started to appear. We had two demos, one from 2017 and one from 2020, with the material that was then filtered and developed into what was recorded.”

This temporal amalgam, the contributions of multiple songwriters interpreting a breadth of influences from within and outside of heavy metal and its component microgenres, comes together on The Return of Magik for a sound that can be overwhelming at peak intensity or hauntingly sparse, but that is immediately identifiable regardless of volume. There is no mistaking who this band is or what they do, and after 14 years, the intangible pull of their singularity is a result of consciously shaping these songs as they are. The magik may be bleak, but the manner in which Rwake revel in it can only be called a celebration.