Track By Tracks: Takipnik - Awakened (2025)

1. Dawn:

This song came to me the morning after attending Decibel Metal and Beer Fest. I remember my ears were still ringing from bands like Red Chord and Cephalic Carnage, but I was also feeling inspired. So, I fired up my home studio console and started firing away at the song, not knowing exactly where I was going with it, but the pieces quickly fell into place. A few additional parts of the song came to us later in the month, but most of it came quickly. The main writing focus of Dawn was the layering of guitars. Most of the sections have an interesting melody and a unique layering of the riffs. The funny thing about the first vocal line, “you will find what is right,” is that it actually started as a placeholder when I was first writing the song. I hadn’t written any real lyrics yet, but that line stuck for some reason. One of the parts feels odd to sing over because of the way the guitar chords have a more dissonate modal sprawl. It was tricky at first to find the notes to focus on. The name of the song just came to me, which is often the case. I name songs quickly, and it’s typically what comes to me first. I will then use the name as the foundation or inspiration for the lyrics. This also opened the door to realizing “Dusk” as its book-end companion.

2. Seeing Red:

This is a song that was written a few years back. It’s actually the second song that would have been written for this record. So here is the story behind the name. I just bought a red Les Paul guitar, and this was the first song I had written with it. So... I went with the Seeing Red theme since it was written with a red guitar and the song was this smashed, distorted, angry theme already. This song was a goal for Ethan (bass player at the time and co-writer) and me to create something catchy and short, which we had never done before. I remember wanting to carry on with the last part more, and him saying No, cut it short. It was good discipline for me! We did well with this one, in my opinion. It’s a catch,y short and angry-sounding song. We put a lot of dirt on the instruments throughout - Ethan’s bass almost sounds like a distorted chainsaw saw and Brandon’s drums hit hard.

3. Disingenuous:

This is one of those songs I’ve had an interesting relationship with. I liked it, then I started not liking it, and was even considering pulling it - but after starting that conversation with the band, I realized it was loved by the other members. Somewhere along the way, I ended up loving it again. It’s the first song I ever wrote on a baritone guitar, which is awesome. It brings some similar vibes of Seeing Red, with a riff on the chorus that I just love. That riff gave me some Deftones vibe. I initially wanted a more complex beat on the chorus, but Brandon pushed for the simpler, solid punching beat, which turned out to be a good choice for this tune.

4. The Finding:

This song means a lot to me, and it’s one of those songs that felt like the ‘song stork’ delivered it right to me. The main foundation of the song came to me out of nowhere. One winter evening, I was watching TV and picked up my Fender Strat and just started playing it – when something comes that naturally, I instantly have to record it. Ethan added some really amazing melodic guitar layers on the instrumental sections. One of the parts uses a slide with an E-bow. Ethan loves instrumental music, so these sections were a ton of fun for him to work on. The guest vocalist is Athena Wilkinson, an engineer at Evergroove Studio who has a degree in vocal performance. She is an incredible singer! Brandon’s drumming style landed perfectly here as well. Lyrically, rather than one particular event, this song is a culmination of personal experiences, having moments of conflict, sadness, loss, and the struggle of not wanting to let go of what hurts us.

5. Affirmation:

This is kind of a tongue-in-cheek song in what it's about - women posting themselves online for validation or, like the song title states, “affirmation” that they are pretty. And yes, I know guys do it too! Lyrically, the song is kind of a joke, but musically it's far from that. The song uses very specific phrasing in the verses. I find the arrangement interesting. You have verses with some filler transitions and what feels like a pre-chorus section, and the actual chorus that uses this smooth-to-jumpy riff feel. When it came to pressing our record, we had to make the difficult decision of doing a double record, which was going to be super expensive, or cutting one song so we could fit everything onto a single disk. Well, this song ended up being cut from the record pressing. Sorry Affirmation! Don’t worry, it’s still on streaming platforms!

6. Floating on Air:

The back half of the album, side B of the record, contains the post-metal instrumentals starting with Floating on Air. Ethan and I had attempted the January thing referred to as “Jamuary”, where you post a song or song idea every day of the month on a social platform like Instagram. This was one of those songs. Of course, it was much simpler and more scaled back for January, but it served as the starting foundation for Ethan and me to add the bells and whistles to. There’s a lot going on in this song at times. It’s a great song, and I think it’s probably one of Brandon’s favorites on the album.

7. Awakened:

This was the first song written for the album. It starts with this D-minor-add9 chord progression that became the entire foundation of the song. All of the other song parts relate to that progression in some way. This song for us is one of the more hypnotic ones, and it really does feel like a journey from beginning to end, which Ethan and I love in a tune. We laid our album out by placing the post-metal instrumentals on side B - “The Silent” and the songs with vocals on side A - “The Spoken.” Even though this song has some vocal growls, we felt it fit into the side B category. Fun fact from Ethan – next to Dusk, this song had by far the highest recording track-count of any song on the album.

8. Dusk:

Naturally, if we start an album with a song titled “Dawn,” we needed to end with a song titled “Dusk”. We absolutely love this song. It’s different and unique from the rest of the album, but doesn’t feel out of place, either. This one began with a simple riff – the first clean one - that I then developed with the distorted section after it. That’s when I brought it to Ethan, and he really took it on as his baby, adding most of the rest of the song, turning it back to me for the electronic climax in the middle section (which is one of all of our favorite moments on the album, along with the drop after it). I know Ethan is particularly proud of the last few minutes of the song – he really stretched his harmony muscles and it shows.