HAKEN

Certified standard bearers for the UK prog metal scene, HAKEN have always been a versatile bunch. Three years ago, they released their most adventurous and radical album to date, the frequently bewildering "Fauna", and followed it up with a career-spanning live album, "Liveforms: An Evening With Haken", in 2025. Both releases spoke volumes about HAKEN's desire to fill the world with as much colorful, forward-thinking music as possible, and both cemented their reputation as contemporary prog figureheads. But neither gave any real indication of what would come next. The answer to that conundrum is "in a fever dream", a five-song, 27-minute EP that showcases the newly slimmed down HAKEN lineup, following the departure of bassist Conner Green earlier this year. Although not exactly billed as a comeback or the start of a completely new chapter, this definitely has the feel of a wholesale rebirth. While still firmly in the intricate, progressive metal realm that has informed every album since 2010's "Aquarius" debut, these new songs reinvent the HAKEN sound in subtle ways, and venture into territory that has only been touched upon in peripheral fashion until now.

First comes the title track. Elegant and unsettling, it offers a thrilling blend of downbeat electronics and fluid shapeshifting, as HAKEN flick through their Rolodex of dynamic audacity, morphing from tense, downtempo subtlety to the full-blooded roar of power chords and clattering, cyclical rhythms. Frontman Ross Jennings delivers a career best vocal, as he fights and flails amid rolling waves of keyboards and churning, post-djent riffing. The whole seven-minute experience exudes a formidable rush of gloomy disquiet. Although by no means the most complex song in HAKEN history, "in a fever dream" is arguably the most emotionally immoderate song that the Brits have yet recorded, with a constant, surging undercurrent of edginess and fraught melancholy, and some huge melodic hooks fighting their way through the multi-layered melee. Stunning.

Next, three much more succinct tunes hammer home how adept the band have become at penning self-contained prog blowouts that deliver the goods within traditional parameters. "delirium" is a bold and bombastic tour-de-force, with an insidious chorus that lingers like a restless ghost, and some intriguing detours into swirling electro-metal and taut, cudgeling grooves. "eclipsed by you" steps away from HAKEN's usual inclinations and comes across as a mesmerizing, post-rock experiment, wherein Jennings's voice prettifies the foreground and an assortment of hot-blooded synths and skittering, programmed (and live) drums conjure an atmosphere of futuristic flamboyance with blissful, shoegaze-adjacent overtones. In contrast, "bleeding sky" burns slowly and steadily, before a fidgeting beat and some gnarly, processed guitars break the still, just in time for another gorgeous chorus and a wonderful, drawn-out and delicate final crescendo.

If the first four songs on "in a fever dream" delight in their mischievous approach, the closing "lotus" is a more measured and familiar exercise in modern prog excellence. Pointedly cinematic and lush with melodic depth, it cleverly mirrors the opening title track, while enabling HAKEN to flex their instrumental muscles and to indulge in some authentic prog metal bluster. As synths enshroud, Jennings's bittersweet vocals puncture the haze with great clarity, and a mid-song descent into stuttering restraint eventually blossoms into a genuinely lovely and life-affirming ending, albeit still with that overriding sense of melancholy floating in the mid-distance.

Quite what this says about HAKEN's future direction is anyone's guess, but "in a fever dream" is both a brave step away from the expected and a strident consolidation of everything that the band have achieved to date. Ingenious and classy, as ever.