Songfacts®:

• "Awaken" is Breaking Benjamin's first new song since "Far Away" was released in December 2019. The Pennsylvania rockers dropped the track on October 16, 2024, hot on the heels of their new record deal with BMG. It's a nearly four-minute blast of everything fans love about the band: searing guitars, anthemic choruses, and dense vocal production.
• Thematically, "Awaken" wades into familiar Breaking Benjamin territory - personal struggle, resilience, and the search for light in life's darker corners. While the band has remained coy about the song's exact inspiration, the lyrics trace an arc from despair to renewal. Take the evocative line "Life falls to grey, hope of the hopeless" - not exactly a slogan for a greeting card, but deeply resonant. And then there's the chorus: "I awaken, I arise," a fist-pumping mantra of rebirth that practically begs for arena-wide singalongs.
• You can't help but wonder if the song draws on lead singer Benjamin Burnley's own journey. He's been candid about his battles with alcoholism in the past; reportedly 2009's Dear Agony was the first album he wrote sober. Burnley has credited his newfound clarity with sharpening his creative edge, and "Awaken" seems to channel that sense of hard-fought redemption.
• Burnley didn't tackle this one alone. Co-producing alongside him was guitarist Jasen Rauch, a longtime collaborator and former Red axeman who also helmed albums for Korn guitarist Brian Welch's solo project Love and Death.
• Fans got behind this song. It climbed to the top of Billboard's Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, marking Breaking Benjamin's eighth #1 hit. Their chart-topping history goes back to 2007's "Breath," which held the spot for seven weeks.
• Breaking Benjamin meticulously refined "Awaken" over several years. Jasen Rauch revealed on Billboard's Behind the Setlist podcast that the first demo was recorded sometime in 2020 or 2021. The song underwent multiple transformations - its lyrics were rewritten three or four times, the key was changed, tempos were adjusted, and the verses were rewritten twice. "Sometimes you have to hit the brakes and say, 'It's just not ready. It's not there,'" Rauch explained.