Hillsong Worship - Awake (2019)

Hillsong Worship, one of the most established church-based praise and worship collectives, has a catalog packed with live albums—one for nearly every year since 1992—and those recordings capture congregations fervently singing along. Awake was made differently: Hillsong’s leaders brought their songs into the studio. “The sound of Hillsong Worship is the sound of the church, primarily,” explains Brooke Ligertwood, who leads the group and coproduced the album. “You put on a record and you can hear our church singing. Before we entered this process, we had to ask ourselves some questions: What's the sound of our community when you take it out of that live context?” Many of the arrangements build toward anthemic pop-rock catharsis, progressing from hushed single-voice intros to billowing guitars, keyboards and choral harmonies and churning tom-tom patterns, all treated with reverb and ambient effects that give the tracks an immersive quality. Here Ligertwood goes through each of the album’s 12 tracks.