The album continued the band’s dominance at the height of a hard rock resurgence
Godsmack’s second full-length album, Awake, released in October 2000, captured the band in a moment of fast, volatile momentum: coming off the breakout success of their 1998 self-titled debut and suddenly being pushed into the position of carrying mainstream hard rock into the early 2000s. The writing and recording process for Awake reflected both pressure and confidence. After touring nonstop behind their debut — a cycle that included Ozzfest and relentless club-to-arena jumps — frontman Sully Erna had stockpiled riffs, fragments, and lyrical ideas while on the road. A lot of Awake was built from aggressive, darker material that the band had been toying with live even before it was formally tracked.
Instead of drastically changing their sound between albums, Godsmack leaned into what was already working. Sessions for the album took place primarily at River’s Edge Productions in Haverhill, Massachusetts, with additional work done at New Alliance Studios in Boston and mixed in Los Angeles. Erna again acted as the band’s creative nucleus, not just as vocalist and primary songwriter but as a co-producer, shaping the drum tones, bass attack, and layered, chugging guitars so they hit with a mechanical precision that separated Godsmack from more groove-oriented post-grunge bands. He approached Awake almost like a live document with better sonics: tight, dry, punchy, with little polish. Lyrically, the record dug into distrust, power, addiction, and defiance — themes that resonated with the band’s blue-collar fanbase and with the wider nü-metal/alt-metal audience of the era, but delivered with Godsmack’s colder, more clenched jaw delivery instead of the confessional overshare that defined some of their peers.
Musically, Awake sharpened Godsmack’s identity. Where the debut album had songs like “Whatever” that rode on a kind of bar-fight swagger, Awake was meaner and more paranoid. The title track “Awake,” built around a serrated palm-muted riff and Erna’s clipped, staccato vocal phrasing, set the tone for the whole record and would become one of the band’s signature songs. Other tracks like “Greed,” “Sick of Life,” and “Mistakes” continued their mix of detuned, percussive guitar work and tom-heavy drumming that flirted with tribal/industrial elements without going full electronic. The album also contained the song “Vampires,” an instrumental-with-spoken-word-samples built around eerie atmospherics and pulse-driven groove, which later earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Instrumental Performance — a detail that surprised critics who’d mostly framed Godsmack as blunt-force radio metal.
The overall production is stark and hostile: bass up front, guitars dry and suffocating, drums locked to a grid. You can hear how road-tested these songs are. There’s very little studio gloss, which in 2000 made Awake feel heavier and more serious than some of the highly processed, turntable-laced nü-metal that dominated MTV at the time. Erna has talked about being protective of the band’s sonic identity — no rapping, no DJ, no bright major-key choruses — and Awake is where that philosophy really hardens into the Godsmack “sound.”
Critical response to Awake in 2000 was mixed but noticeably more engaged than it had been for the debut. Some rock and metal outlets praised the album’s cohesion and the band’s refusal to soften up now that they were on mainstream radio, arguing that Awake was tighter, heavier, and more focused than Godsmack’s first record. Reviewers who were already skeptical of late-’90s alt-metal were harsher, calling the band one-dimensional and accusing Erna of posturing. A recurring criticism at the time was that Godsmack leaned too hard on mid-tempo chug riffs and tough-guy hostility without broadening their dynamic range. But that same stance — that blunt, confrontational, don’t-talk-to-me energy — was exactly why fans loved it. Among listeners, Awake was embraced as a step up: angrier, more serious, more “no BS,” and absolutely built for live shows. “Awake” and “Greed” in particular became anthems in the active rock and metal scenes, blasting from rock radio, strip clubs, military barracks, and used Camaros all over the U.S. Fans in 2000–2001 tended to talk about Godsmack the way Pantera fans in the early ’90s talked about Pantera: not as critics’ band, but as a working-class aggression outlet, a band that felt like a crew you knew.
Commercially, Awake was a major success and it proved that Godsmack were not a fluke. When the album dropped, it debuted high on the Billboard 200 (the band’s profile after the debut and Ozzfest run guaranteed first-week attention) and it quickly went platinum in the United States, then double platinum as its singles stuck around on radio into 2001. The title track “Awake” became one of Godsmack’s biggest singles. On U.S. rock radio formats like Mainstream Rock/Active Rock, it hit No. 1 and held heavy rotation for months. “Awake” also crossed enough into MTV that it gave the band a real visual presence. This mattered, because MTV in 2000 still had cultural leverage; Total Request Live (TRL) was mostly a pop and teen-leaning show built around boy bands, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Eminem, Limp Bizkit, Korn, and whatever else teen viewers were calling in to vote for after school.
Godsmack were not a typical TRL band, but the “Awake” video did show up on the show’s countdown during the album’s push, which signaled that they’d broken from purely metal radio into youth mainstream visibility alongside the other “heavy” acts that could hang with pop. “Greed,” with its sneering hook and video built around corporate greed, also landed in rotation on MTV and MTV2. That visibility mattered for long-tail sales: Awake kept moving units well past release, ultimately selling in the multi-million range in the U.S. alone and cementing Godsmack as a top-selling hard rock act of the early 2000s, not just a temporary nü-metal-era name.
The success of the album set up a touring cycle that was loud, constant, and strategically smart. Godsmack hit the road hard in late 2000 and throughout 2001, headlining their own shows in mid-size arenas and large theaters while also anchoring festival and radio-station all-day bills. This was the period where they really evolved from “club headliner that can steal an Ozzfest side stage” into a reliable main-stage, pyro-and-lights hard rock act. The staging behind Awake leaned into a militaristic, industrial aesthetic: lots of cold lighting, heavy strobes, metal grating, synchronized hits where the lights punched on beat with the drums, and a vibe that said warzone more than party. The band’s live sets from this era typically opened with newer material like “Sick of Life” and “Awake” up front to set the tone, then folded in the earlier hits “Whatever,” “Keep Away,” and “Voodoo” from the debut. “Voodoo,” with its tribal percussion and chant-like vocals, became a dramatic set piece: multiple drums onstage, Erna stepping off the mic to join in on floor toms, the crowd turning it into this ritual moment. That rhythmic/cathartic element in the show helped Godsmack stand apart from other bands on the same radio playlists, and it built their reputation as a must-see live act instead of just a loud band on CD.
Awake’s touring cycle also lined up with a wave of crossover exposure for the band in military and sports culture, which fed back into the album’s life span. Tracks from Awake — especially “Sick of Life,” with its spoken-word intro about “We are not prepared to believe that the war is over” — were used in promotional spots, bumper music, and hype reels for wrestling programs, extreme sports broadcasts, and military recruiting ads in the early 2000s. That association with intensity, aggression, and combat read as authentic to a certain audience, which only deepened the band’s base and kept demand high for tickets. By the time the Awake cycle wound down, Godsmack had moved from being “the band from Boston that blew up off ‘Whatever’” to being positioned as one of the definitive mainstream heavy rock bands of the early 2000s, the kind of act radio counted on, MTV could still program in the nu-metal era without losing credibility, and promoters could reliably put at the top of a summer shed bill.
In hindsight, Awake is the album that locks in the Godsmack formula: down-tuned stomp riffs, Erna’s barked vocals, bruised paranoia, drums that feel like they could dent the hood of a car, and a visual/audio brand built around menace rather than vulnerability. It didn’t reinvent them so much as harden them. The debut proved they could break; Awake proved they could stay. Critics in 2000 might not have loved the record’s lack of range, but fans absolutely did, and the numbers backed the fans. The record hit the top tier of the Billboard 200, spun off multiple rock radio staples, pushed Godsmack onto MTV and even TRL during a pop-dominated era, went multi-platinum in the U.S., earned them a Grammy nod off an atmospheric instrumental, and fueled a tour that graduated them to full-scale headliner status. In terms of career arc, Awake is where Godsmack stopped being an upstart and became a brand.
