Progressive rockers HAKEN recently announced their seventh studio album “Fauna”, their most genre-busting and conceptually fascinating album to date. The album will be released on March 3rd, 2023, and following the release of ‘Nightingale’ and “The Alphabet of Me”, the band are pleased to release “Taurus” the 3rd single from the album. Watch the video, produced by Crystal Spotlight, below.
Ross Jennings says this about the track: “With such a diverse and eclectic array of material on ‘Fauna’, it was important for us to include a piece of music that represented the metallic edge of our sound which was exploited predominantly on ‘Vector’ & ‘Virus’, with our focus being on hard hitting riffs in odd time signatures.”
“The song’s lyrics were written roughly at the same time we all started hearing about the devastation and crisis happening in Ukraine. I was already writing the piece based on the annual migration of the wildebeests with strong references to people traveling in herds and strength in numbers. Suddenly I realized I had an anchor for what the song could be about and knowing this gives it all the more emotional weight; We’re all on some sort of journey towards salvation or enlightenment. Sometimes out of choice or not, we need to leave the past behind us and make new beginnings. We only have each other, and belief and hope are our strongest allies.”
“Fauna” sees the band exploring new ideas conceptually as Ross continues. “The premise of the album when we started writing it was that every song would have an animal assigned to it. They all have something related to the animal kingdom that we could write about, but they also connect to the human world. Each track has layers, and some of them are more obvious than others.”
“It reminds me of ‘The Mountain’,” adds guitarist and fellow founder Richard Henshall. “There, we had the idea of not really a narrative-based album, but more the concept of climbing a mountain and overcoming the obstacles along the way. Then we took that and thought about how it could relate to our everyday lives. All of Fauna’s animals relate to us, personally.”
“Fauna” also marks the return of keyboard player Peter Jones, whose sounds can be heard permeating the entire album. “What Pete’s brought sonically to the band has played a massive role in why we do have a lot of new sounds on this record,” says Ross. “It’s always a new dynamic when there’s a change in personnel, and this is a fresh and reviving one. It’s certainly helped proximity-wise, with Pete being in the country: Pete and Ray [Hearne, Haken’s drummer] would be at Rich’s place and they’d just start jamming. That’s really key to how the songs start.”
“Fauna” will be available on several formats, including Ltd 2CD (incl. instrumentals), Standard CD, Gatefold 2LP & as Digital Album. The albums stunningly detailed artwork was created by Dan Goldsworthy (Charlie Griffiths, Sylosis).
“Fauna” Album Artwork
Pre-order now HERE.
“Fauna” track-listing:
1. Taurus 04:49
2. Nightingale 07:24
3. The Alphabet of Me 05:33
4. Sempiternal Beings 08:23
5. Beneath The White Rainbow 06:45
6. Island In The Clouds 05:45
7. Lovebite 03:49
8. Elephants Never Forget 11:07
9. Eyes Of Ebony 08:32
Haken recently announced a co-headline tour with Between The Buried & Me in Europe for early 2023, with support from Cryptodira. These will be the first dates in support of “Fauna” find the full list of dates HERE.
