Haken: A Fine Line Between Consistence and Evolution
Concept albums with recurring musical themes and motifs are nothing new, especially when it comes to the genres of progressive rock and metal. DREAM THEATER have done it on a few occasions in the past, but the London-based progressive metal attraction HAKEN mastered it on Virus, their sixth studio album since 2010, released on July 24th through InsideOut Music.
“With Vector and Virus, the last two albums, it was the intention when we started Vector that we would have not quite a double album, but we planned the next two albums ahead and we wanted to base the albums conceptionally around this Cockroach King character that we’ve come up with on The Mountain,” singer Ross Jennings starts our conversation. “We just found that we could explore different topics whilst focusing on this character, and it was just a very interesting and fascinating journey to take conceptionally. But also musically as well, we have some recurring themes from The Cockroach King that we’ve cracked up, and we did in a more subtle manner with Vector but it’s a bit more explicit, I would say, certainly on The Messiah Complex, which is the big suite at the end.”
For HAKEN, it was always the intention to explore this concept over the two albums cycle. As Jennings offers, “we set out sometimes to make just albums with separate songs but there is something about us musicians and songwriters, we kinda like recurring themes, it gives us joy to hear those. Because we don’t make pop music. And you get a lot of repetition in pop music which is enjoyable, but in prog music, things tend to take a more of a linear path, so when you hear something you recognise in a prog song it’s a big deal, you know. It’s kind of fun.”
In terms of variety and diversity, the six-piece have outdone themselves with Virus, boasting influences from a wide selection of genres. Band’s vision for Vector was to execute a very straight rock, metal album. “What happens in Virus is we tend to kind of bring back some of those elements that people might have enjoyed, more soft elements and some of the more melodic and longer songs, for example. Some of the other elements of HAKEN songwriting which people have enjoyed from previous albums tend to make reappearance here.”
Virus offers a more eclectic mix of songs, but it’s still a very different sounding album than what the band has done before. “We’ve drawn upon different influences this time,” Ross admits. “Some kind of post-rock and soft kind of rock, and indie bands that we love. There is even some sort of FOO FIGHTERS kind of elements in one or two tracks, not in an attempt to make it more commercial but just because we just enjoy so many different styles of music. And it tends to come free that way. But the challenge, obviously, really was to complete this journey, this concept, but also just to fulfil and tick all these boxes what makes a good HAKEN album.”
Drawing parallels between Vector and Virus, it’s kind of expected that the two are cut from the same cloth, with Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood returning at the producer’s chair. However, the production of Virus is like nothing else HAKEN have done so far.
“It’s a fine line between keeping something consistent but also stepping up and raising the game a little bit. We obviously wanted to improve some of the guitar tones and drum sounds. I might be wrong about this, but I think Ray used about four different snare drums across the album. Nolly was quite instrumental in the setup for that with the mic positioning. He has a good relationship with Ray. I wasn’t present on the sessions, unfortunately, but I know that they took a lot to get the right sounds that we are going for. That was impressive. We also sat with Nolly in his studio in Bristol when we went to reamp the guitars, and that was a session I wasn’t involved other than sitting back and listening,” he says. “But it was really fascinating seeing him working with Richard and Charly on guitar tones. We went for a lot of options and after a while we started to not see the differences so much. That was interesting. It’s Nolly’s work as much as it’s ours in some ways, so he obviously wanted to get the best sound for us as well. It’s a really good relationship that we have with him. He said he enjoyed working with us because he tends to work with a lot of metalcore, djent bands, so he found working with us and our approach to melody quite refreshing.”
The 17-minute Messiah Complex suite from Virus is through-and-through choke-full of Easter eggs. It feels like a game where the listener is faced with the task of solving this ultimate sonic puzzle. It doesn’t take too much to figure out where Ectobius Rex comes from and what it is about, but other pieces including A Glutton for Punishment and Marigold actually segue from Puzzle Box and Cell Divides, respectively.
“There’s quite a lot of elements that have been translated from Nil by Mouth, the instrumental on Vector,” Jennings says. “There’s a few lines in vocals which reference some of those parts in Nil by Mouth. I’m gonna forget every single reference, but we really enjoyed putting in those Easter eggs, it just means it’s not such a passive experience and something that you would return to again and again and unlock all these hidden mysteries and little licks, riffs and things that you might’ve heard across Vector, but also previous albums as well. It’s all part of this idea, this extended HAKEN universe that people talk about online.”
It seems that over the years you’ve started an avalanche of conspiracy theories with your albums among the prog community, and with Vector to be launched this seems like it’s just going to drastically expand. What is your look on that? Do you, in a way, find it amusing to do this all over again?
Ross: Yeah, absolutely. It is amusing to us. [laughs] Some of the theories actually surprise us. And then there are some theories where I wish we would have made it a bit more cryptic. They’ve unravelled that mysteries far too quickly. There’s a lot of hidden things in the artwork. We encourage people to purchase the physical format as well because there’s a lot more of that work which you can discover by reading the lyrics and looking at the artwork, and seeing all the clues in there as well. That’s something we are very conscious of, and we want to continue.
Would you say that what started with Vector is ending with Virus, or it’s in a way an open book that HAKEN could potentially revisit in the future?
Ross: I don’t know. It was fun to do for now. I think moving forward we want to just move away, certainly from the concept in terms of that particular storyline that we’ve come up with – that’s finished, that’s rounded off. But, you never know. A lot of people ask me for Aquarius II, I don’t know if they’re joking. [laughs] I do read social media from time to time. I think as an artist it was quite a fun thing to do, but I think genuinely we just want to move forward and find new ideas.
Unfortunately, as of right now it seems that HAKEN will not be able to spread the virus across the world live this year, due to this other virus outbreak. What are your plans when it comes to the promotion of the album for the next few months? Do you plan on doing any livestream shows?
Ross: It’s hard to say if we’ll do shows, but we’ll see what happens with the lockdown and if any restrictions are lifted, then maybe we’ll be able to meet up. But that’s usually quite difficult anyway with Conner Green living in the USA, but as a lot of artists at the moment we are trying to embrace some of the online platforms for communicating with the fans. We are running a Twitch account at the moment where we are going into details to certain songs or albums. We try to find new ideas to engage and communicate with our fanbase. And hopefully that will help with the promotion of the record as well. I think the label is doing all those usual things. I’m doing lots of interviews at the moment with a lot of the press. The standard promotion is gonna go ahead. It just the shame that people will not be able to see it live for some time because we had plans to tour in the summer.
It’s been 10 years since your debut album. Before the outbreak happened, have you talked about doing something special for that occasion?
Ross: We have talked about that, and I think with all the touring we had booked in any way, we did end up deciding on just playing the Aquamedley again, so we did that on few shows and some of those shows were cancelled actually in the end. I’d love to play Aquarius in full someday but I’m not sure, maybe we’ll wait for the 20th anniversary.
Virus is your sixth studio album since 2010. How do you feel you’ve evolved as a musician and songwriter, and also as a band collectively, across those recordings?
Ross: We are getting to know each other’s songwriting styles better now. Actually writing this album was a lot of fun. We were trapped in the bus together for a month with a deadline. We were a bit behind on the writing, even that we had a lot of stuff prepared beforehand, getting the final craft done was kind of late. We found ourselves on tour with DEVIN TOWNSEND in Europe, just getting all the elements in place and sometimes even starting songs from scratch and totally reworking some of the ideas we had. It was great fun to actually do that in the same room, because nowadays it’s not so much the case. We do a lot of file sharing online and we do our own writing quite separate, even though it’s collaborative, like in many ways it’s not. But I think we’ve all evolved since 2010 massively, and certainly, our tastes have changed. And how we want to present ourselves as artists definitely changed since the Aquarius days, even if we still love those records and we still love playing them. Just in terms of new music – you know, people are always gonna love the older stuff, but artists need to evolve naturally anyway, so just expect things constantly progress.
Virus is set for release on July 24th via InsideOut Music.
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