Fauna is the seventh studio album by English progressive metal band Haken. It was released on 3 March 2023 through Inside Out Music. The album is the first release without keyboardist Diego Tejeida, who left the band in 2021. Founding member Peter Jones served as his replacement. The first single "Nightingale" was released on 26 April 2022, when the band had not yet started to record the whole album.[3] The second single "The Alphabet of Me" was first announced, along with the cover art and name of the album, at their website with a puzzle game.[4]
When composing and presenting initial song sketches, we very much had an "anything goes" mentality, and whilst sounding atypically Haken, it was a piece that was all exciting us to explore and integrate into our song canon. Where the lyrics are concerned, I leant heavily on one of my favourite writers Philip K. Dick, for inspiration. Keeping our loose concept of spirit animals in mind, I re-read 'Do robots dream of electric sheep?' (Which would later be adapted into the 1982 film 'Blade Runner') knowing symbolically that animals played a key role in the story. This, along with revisiting both movies from the Blade Runner franchise, opened up some deeper philosophical topics about the nature of identity which have served as a backbone for the lyrical content.
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'. 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 animales relate to us, personally".
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