#Rwake

[dreamsofconsciousnessmetal]

Dreams of Consciousness Podcast Episode 376 features an interview with Brittany Fugate and John Judkins of Rwake.

Listen on Youtube Music Listen on Apple Podcasts (IOS) Direct Download [right click + "Save As"]

My thanks again to Brittany and John for speaking with me, and to you for listening.

Music In This Episode:

"Crooked Rivers" taken from the album Voices Of Omens

"Smog Monster" taken from the album Hell Is A Door To The Sun

"With Stardust Flowers" "You Swore We'd Always Be Together" "The Return of Magik" (excerpt) taken from the album The Return Of Magik

Rwake on BandcampRwake on FacebookRwake on IG

The Return Of Magik on the Relapse webshop

[doommetallyics]

To all the wizards sent to Hell For causing riots and casting spells There is a spirit who walks the line There he pushes your mind. Rwake - The Return of Magik - The Return of Magik

[stylized-corpse]

Rwake returns after 13 years with a glorious and triumphant new record.

[demonspeeding666]

𝔓𝔢𝔬𝔭𝔩𝔢 𝔩𝔦𝔨𝔢 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔧𝔲𝔰𝔱 𝔣𝔲𝔢𝔩 𝔪𝔶 𝔣𝔦𝔯𝔢

[gotankgo]

[album-a-day-project]

5/19/25

Rwake

The Return of Magik

====

It's a mix of spoken word and also metal. There are definitely elements to this that I like and that I think are unique. It reminds me a lot of conscious hip hop. Its just not really for me. If spoken poetry in hip hop is troubling, abstract imagery in metal spoken word is even worse.

AAD Recommends: 62%

[dustedmagazine]

Rwake — The Return of Magik (Relapse)

Photo by Jonathon Oudthone

The Return of Magik is a presumptuous sort of title to lay on a record that constitutes an additional, less abstract return. Rwake, Arkansas’ foremost purveyors of grand and gritty doom metal, had not released an LP of new music since Rest, way back in 2011. Hearing that date is just about enough to make you reminiscent: Obama in the Oval Office, Kim Jong Il shuffling off this mortal coil (Bin Laden, too, somewhat less gently…), the Arab Spring roiling North Africa and the Middle East with the promise of something like self-determination. Sort of nice to think of, in spite of the way history’s pulverizing sweep has moved us all along. Doom metal has its own sense of pulverizing sweep, and often an instinct for drama. Those are qualities that resonate with Rwake, a band that likes the long form and big musical gestures. Magik? Even maybe magic? That’s a more complicated order.

Some things have remained constant in Rwake’s sound over the 14 years since Rest: post-metal high-brow antics mix it up with blues-oriented toughness; frontman CT entwines his snarly, gnarly vocals with the even harsher shrieks of Brittany Fugate; the dual guitar attack is potent, by turns soaring and grotty. But the guitar players have changed up, with John Judkins and Austin Sublett now complementing the stable bottom end of Reid Raley and Jeff Morgan. Befitting CT’s informal status as musicologist of Southern metal (see his 2010 doc Slow Southern Steel), Rwake has increasingly incorporated textures drawn from their Arkansas roots. The music is by turns humid and thick, heavy and then shaped by languid grooves.

Standout track “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration” solidifies the Arkansan vibe, devoting its opening two minutes to a mystic spoken word recitation from Jim “Dandy” Mangrum, inimitable (for good and for ill) singer and maniacal personality of Black Oak Arkansas. In a creaky, craggy voice, Mangrum opines that contemporary youth “are lab rats, per se…incarcerated in a do-it-yourself psychedelic jail cell deep within their own minds.” One assumes that Mangrum has Prozac and Oxy equally in mind here, all forms of self-medication that help folks cope with the crush and torment of consciousness. Mangrum is one who knows, a veteran of the early 1970s, when the music and the drugs got seriously heavy.

It's an interesting historicizing maneuver, and a sort of cosmological one. Rwake’s doomy metal has its own dark and intense trippiness, a challenging variety of consciousness expansion that wants to open by tearing. You might float along through the opening minutes of “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration” (or through the even prettier opening of “You Swore We’d Always Be Together”), but the heavy riffage and desperate shrieks inevitably come. Those are intense forces, seeking portals for escape, rending the fabric of the Real with ecstatic violence. Is that magical? Depends on the listener. This reviewer finds Rwake’s charms seductive and dangerous, and just as potent as ever.

Jonathan Shaw

[kimkimberhelen]

RWAKE - The Return of Magik (Official Music Video) 2025

[whoshotthefrog]

Rwake - A Stone, A Leaf, An Unfound Door: Blue (109)

[ace-and-the-rpg-horrors]

I WHEEXNDBEED

ITS TOOO EARLY FOR THIS GOOGLE DOESNT EVEN KNOW

WHAT GOOGLE ARE YOU USING

[puppysdog]

acid bath, weedeater, and rwake....im gonna be so high at that show i wont remember it