The recording of The Wakening flowed directly from the recording of the demo. I was still writing the newer songs like "Psychosis/Invoking Villainy" and "Enslaved Cadavers" while at the same time refining the guitar and bass sounds and laying down better-sounding and better-produced audio tracks. I was happier with the more professional sound that we had on this one compared to the earlier demo songs.

As you may have heard from the songs or the tales surrounding the various pieces of the Prophecies of Doom demo compilation, we were also planning on slotting in Ramrod's vocals here, but when that didn't work out we redid rehearsal vocals with me while hunting for the new vocalist, Notorius. When he joined we had still another new song, "Here Comes the War" thanks to Ramrod and Aerik, and we didn't want the new vocals to go over tracks that were one to two years old, so in early 2005 we pretty much rerecorded the entire album with all-new takes, building off of the "Here Comes the War" basic tracks that were easily the best-sounding 'demos' that we had.

The final takes were all done through Spring of 2005, maybe bleeding over into early summer, but going back now I seem to remember it still being a few months between when we handed over the master and when it was released in September of 2005. I was still in a fast-and-furious 'record' mode, though, because I managed to get a lot of Rampage stuff done over the last half of 2005 and into early 2006, even if not much of it has made its way into the light of day yet. But, that's another band and another issue for another day.

As for The Wakening itself, I'm still really happy with it. If there are two minor gripes with it, they are such: first, I wish I hadn't poured so much reverb on top of the delay on the lead vocals - it still sounds too cavernous for my current tastes, like I'd listened to too much early 2000s Norse Black Metal - and I wish I'd remembered to tell Tormentor to put that big drum fill just before the third verse on "Here Comes the War". He did it the way I wanted on the live album, and I don't know why I didn't have him fix it up on the studio track. I think I may have just been impatient to get the damn album finished at that time. Live and learn, I guess.