On their seventh studio album, Haken are ready to bust any pre-conceptions about where they might or might not fit musically. Fauna is inspired by the natural world and finds the progressive metal six-piece entering new musical territory. Multi-instrumentalist Richard Henshall and returning keyboard player Pete Jones reveal the story behind its creation and the “anything goes” attitude that helped to shape it.

Words: Grant Moon

Haken are back in business!

Images: Max Taylor-Grant

“Our music is pretty intense at times, and you need to have that kind of balance – if you bombard the listener with too much of the same mood or colour, they’re going to turn it off, and not come back.”

Richard Henshall

Richard Henshall’s been in his home studio, trying to get his impressive hands around the guitar parts for Messiah Complex so it’s gig-ready. That five-part, 17-minute suite from Haken’s presciently titled 2020 release Virus was the brainchild of their drummer, Ray Hearne, and, says Henshall, “It’s easily our hardest song to play. Each of us has probably spent about a year trying to get it up to scratch. When he wrote it Ray just programmed the riffs with his fingers on a keyboard, but it’s almost impossible to actually play. But we’ll try it, and we’ll see.”

By now, they will have. When this issue of Prog lands, the London prog metal sextet will be deep into their 37-date Island In Limbo tour, a co-headline jaunt across Europe with North Carolina’s finest, Between The Buried And Me. It’s Haken’s longest continuous run of shows, during which they’ll play some of their biggest venues. While the tour serves in part as a soft relaunch for Virus (which never got its proper shake because of, well, The Virus), it also marks the start of a big, year-long push for their new, seventh album.

What a many-headed beast Fauna is. Magnificently mixed and mastered by Jens Bogren (who did the same for their 2013 breakthrough album, The Mountain), it’s colossal, detailed and dizzyingly diverse. Just contrast the epic first single, Nightingale, and the current heavy-hooky one, Lovebite, the latter with lyrics inspired by the mating ritual of the black widow spider. There’s a lot to unpack here.

They’ll take the record to North America in May with The Fauna Expedition Tour, starting in Nashville on May 3 and closing in Chicago on June 3. A few weeks later, they’ll be at Midsummer Prog in the Netherlands and the following month there’s their high-bill slot at Manchester’s Radar Festival, which will be a 10th anniversary set for The Mountain. And more shows are in the works after that.

“It’s crazy,” Henshall tells Prog, when we speak to him a fortnight before jetting off to Hamburg for the opening show. “It’s gonna be the busiest year in our career, and I’m very excited. We’ve been at home for the last two and a half years, practically stuck in the house, changing nappies and watching Netflix. So it’s gonna be a real contrast to be back on the road.”