Karma Loop, the latest track from In Virtue’s album Age of Legends, emerges as an intense dialogue between the characters Sisyphus and The Catalyst, exploring themes of guilt, redemption, and self-forgiveness. Featuring guest vocals by Charlotte Wessels, the song blends heavy riffs, melodic hooks, and cinematic textures to create an engaging sonic narrative.

By Sandra Pinto

In this interview, the band reveals the creative process behind the track, the importance of literary and cultural references in shaping its concept, and how collaboration between current and former members helped craft a song that quickly became a standout on the album.

“Karma Loop” was the last track written for Age of Legends. How did it quickly become a favorite for the band?
Honestly it wasn’t until Charlotte sent back her vocals that it really clicked for me. Until that point it was just my terrible falsetto placeholder vocals that we’d been hearing, so we knew the composition was solid, but it’s a little hard to believe it will be great until you hear the real thing. She also added a few harmonies and things that REALLY put it over the top for me.

How does the single fit into the broader narrative of the album Age of Legends?
In terms of the story of the album, it’s the first time we really hear a conversation between Sisyphus and The Catalyst. It’s really her trying to convince him to fight for his own soul. She places his past ill deeds in context against the punishment he has already endured for them, and makes the argument that it doesn’t matter if the ones who sentenced him think he’s served his time or not (they never will, he was sentenced to eternity) – he needs to forgive himself if that is ever going to even matter. We’ve seen the Catalyst character in the music videos for Purgatory (played by the little girl) and Scream (played by Zel Romero), but this is only one of two places on the album she actually explicitly gets a voice (the other being in Tempus Fugue by Chaney Crabb).

What emotions or messages did you want to convey to listeners with Karma Loop?
I think this song contains the most explicit and potent version of the larger message of the album – that forgiveness must come from yourself for it to matter. Guilt is just a millstone if you don’t learn from it, and you can’t learn from it without first transmuting it into self-forgiveness – because the alternative is that it rots you, and then it goes the other way. You can’t forgive yourself if you think you don’t deserve it, and that’s why The Catalyst makes her case that Sisyphus does deserve it.

Charlotte Wessels contributed guest vocals on the track. How did this collaboration come about, and how did it influence the song’s dynamic?
I’ve known Charlotte for a while now, did some interviews with her and her old band, and  wecollaborated on a song for my Writing Songs From RANDOM Drum Grooves series on YouTube. She was not only easy to work with, she’s also incredibly creative, an amazing songwriter, and a stellar musician – she played CLARINET on that track. She’s also a totally sweet person, and she was a huge help in the logistical challenges of shooting the music video while I was in Utrecht. Although the song was mostly written when we sent it to her, like I said, she really brought it to life with a true banger of a performance and there’s a few harmonies that she added that kicked it into the emotional stratosphere.

The creative process involved several current and former band members. How was it working with different perspectives to shape the final track?
It’s one of only 2 songs on the album that were true co-writes from the ground up, and probably the most sort of “stone soup” collaborative efforts. As someone who mostly writes alone, it was kind of proof that I shouldn’t as much. I’ve got something that many musicians don’t – the structure perspective. It makes me a good producer and composer because I can really see the larger picture of the song as a whole. But it can also lead to me hamstringing myself because it’s a little bit of a power trip, and then I wind up writing EVERYTHING because I CAN. That leads me to write things that can be a bit too samey – collaboration keeps that from happening. Multiple points of view and musical ideas give the DNA of a track something completely different.

Trey’s guitar riff existed since an old demo. How did it evolve into the final version of Karma Loop?
I initially wrote that lick (the first thing you hear on the song) for a guitar demo on the YouTube channel many years ago. We also used it as the intro song for our first podcast, and I always had it in the back of my mind, and it’s also something I often compulsively mindlessly noodle on the guitar. Our old drummer Mazen (who played on the album and also produced it) also really liked it and he really pushed for it to be part of a full song, so one day he came over and we hashed out a structure based around it. Then I wrote the lyrics and melodies, and later sat down with Alex who added some really tasty keyboard parts. Then I handed it off to Rami who knocked out a totally sick guitar solo. Charlotte was the last one to lay down her parts, but like the rug in The Big Lebowski, it really pulled it all together.

The lyrics reference Sisyphus mythology and cultural icons like the Kingston Trio and Hunter S. Thompson. How did these literary and cultural elements help build the song’s concept?
For me, those kinds of references are really potent shortcuts to triggering connections in peoples’ minds. They’re kind of like macros on a computer – if I can piggyback on the listener’s previous associations and ideas gathered from other sources, then I can deliver an even larger
message on top of those structures. If I have to completely construct someone’s understanding of an idea from scratch, then I can’t go as far as I want to with the idea, it just takes too long. But it’s also partly for me to get a better grasp on it, and to embed a lot of meaning into it based on my own understanding. I’m leveraging concepts like Sisyphus, which is an idea that everyone understands to some extent, to springboard to the conclusion that I’m drawing about it. Sisyphus is the opposite of “happily ever after” – but that’s bullshit. If we think that there’s something you can do in one lifetime to deserve eternal torment, then the game is rigged against all of us. You can’t just say “and then he pushed the boulder up the hill forever” and leave it at that. If he has no opportunity for real rehabilitation and true atonement, then his punishment is nothing more than meaningless cruelty. And the reason this is so important is that we have all been led to believe that this is
how the universe works. I chose the ending of the myth of Sisyphus as the starting point for my story because it cannot end that way. Tapping into this idea let me skip over thousands of years of philosophy to get straight to the point I wanted to make, and it was really the perfect metaphor.

The lyrics explore the idea that “punishment is often self-inflicted.” Could you expand on this philosophy and how it relates to the album’s journey?
Let’s examine the purpose of punishing someone for their wrongdoings – why do we do it? There’s a couple reasons – as a deterrent, to stop people from doing wrong out of fear of the punishment; to provide a consequence to help them understand how what they did affects their
victims and to society; and to provide a sense of justice to the victims and to society as a whole. I might be forgetting one, but anything other than that is just cruelty. In this case, we’re examining the function of punishment to create understanding in the perpetrator of the crime, for them to feel empathy, that they come to know why what they did was wrong and how it harmed someone, and only then will it really matter. Only then can it make you a better person who can move through the world with true caring for your fellow human being.
But we often internalize this punishment as guilt, and continue to punish ourselves for the original infraction and many other things that aren’t deserved, and we become our own prison guards in the process. That makes it impossible for us to move on and improve, and we stay
miserable and treat others badly in the meantime. It’s a terrible cycle of psychological suffering, and the only exit is true self-forgiveness, which is a journey unto itself. Because forgiveness from others is something we seek so that we can forgive ourselves. This album is Sisyphus’
journey through that process, and he has much to atone for.

In Virtue is known for blending heavy riffs, melodic hooks, and cinematic textures. How did you manage to balance these elements in Karma Loop?
It’s all pretty natural to me now – I have a pretty big palette of sounds I’m comfortable using in my music, and pretty much nothing is off-limits. “Cinematic” is an idea I like a lot, because it really just means whatever sound enhances the mood or feeling of the moment – in movie
soundtracks, they’ll use whatever texture sets the tone for what you’re seeing and the story; it’s a subliminal narrator. Movie scores will have orchestra, choir, electronic sounds, guitar and drum kit, sound design elements – nothing is out of the question if it hits. That’s my general approach to writing In Virtue songs – I want them to be heavy and hooky, because that’s what I like, and beyond that, whatever serves to tell the story. In Karma Loop, I felt it needed to be sort of an abstract outside-of-space-and-time feeling, almost like a dream sequence. So the sound is very floaty and suspended, always moving like the platforms in Dimension X from the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons. The music video we did for it also really reflects that I think.

Is there any noticeable sonic evolution compared to previous work that fans will hear in this single and album?
In every single possible way really (laughter). I kinda feel like it’s not even worth digging into because I’ll just be mean to myself. I’ll just say that the production of our previous music is one of the things I had to forgive myself for.

How did the production and arrangement help convey the song’s emotional depth?
If you can believe it, this is actually one of the more barebones arrangements on the album. There’s no orchestration, there’s not a ton of layers of guitars or anything – I like to think it lets the vocals, the story, and the song itself shine. The dynamic structure does a lot of the heavy lifting – each part of the song is designed to really build and grow. You can hear how the first verse starts with next to nothing – simple bass, drums, and vocals. By the time we get to the end of the verse, we’ve changed keys, and all the elements are in full swing with piano, synths, heavy guitars, and some vocal layers, which takes us into the full chorus. The chorus then does a huge key change in the middle from my part to Charlotte’s, which I love to do. I think it helps to convey the depth of the conversation they’re having, each one trying to get a one-up on the other. It fits.

The Karma Loop video features powerful visuals. How does the visual narrative complement the story of the song?
In the Karma Loop music video, I really tried to show Sisyphus and The Catalyst pitted against each other across seemingly unrelated circumstances, the same battle over and over again across time and space. In one storyline, The Catalyst is interrogating Sisyphus like a prisoner, in another they’re casually sparring wits across galaxies whilst lying down, and then in the bridge they face off in a sandstorm.
They’re not fighting per se, but they’re nonetheless locked in an epic conflict of sorts, and I wanted to show how they’re connected and lots of important symbolism where I could, like her taking the nickels off his eyes. That one’s pretty complex – he asks “how much for a man’s
soul?” and says “I just need one more nickel” which is the Kingston Trio reference to the song MTA, with the character Charlie stuck on the train because he doesn’t have a nickel to pay his fare. And coins on the eyes is something they do for the dead to pay the ferryman to cross into
the afterlife, so her taking them off symbolizes her bringing him back to life from his condemnation.
I think symbolism is extremely important, not in a woo superstitious way, but in as concrete terms as possible, art is communication – and I want to be communicating as meaningful and deep of a message as I possibly can, and tapping into solid symbolism and metaphor is the
most powerful and potent way to do that. For example, you might not notice it til the end, but for the performance shots, the band is playing on the center of an enormous clock, and Charlotte is sitting on one of the hands as it swings around.

What were the biggest challenges or most memorable moments while filming the video?
Charlotte and her husband were incredible hosts when I went to the Netherlands to shoot her portion of the video two years ago. I had a wild idea to do an interrogation type scene, and the room in their house that I was staying in just happened to have the perfect look – except that it
was completely full of stuff. It was their spare room/storage space, and with zero hesitation, they were like “YES let’s do it!” and proceeded to help me move everything into another room to clear the space, Thijs became our excellent camera man, Charlotte got into character (I really
think she should do more acting, she was SO GOOD) and away we went. It had me thinking about moving to the Netherlands, I had such a great time there.

What impact do you hope Karma Loop will have on fans and the progressive metal scene?
I hope that Karma Loop’s message will reach far beyond the progressive metal scene to anyone who thinks that they’re beyond saving, and be The Catalyst to help them understand that no matter what yesterday you has done, tomorrow you can be better. I genuinely think that the
ideas contained in this song could make the world a better place if everyone understood them.

Are there plans for new collaborations or sonic experiments for the band in the future?
There aren’t any particular plans per se, only a necessity to do so. I don’t want to do our next music the same way we did this one, and sonic experiments and collaborations are how I’m hoping to push us to the next level. I’d be scared of just repeating myself, to be honest. I’m really loving the freedom we’ve got now that the album is done and out – we’re no longer living under the weight of its impending release. We can write and record and release anything we want now. I’m so incredibly proud of Age of Legends, it’s my absolute baby and it’s exactly what I wanted it to be – but the baby is literally a first-grader, age-wise, now, so I’m ready to put another metaphorical bun in our musical oven, if you will.

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