Richard Henshall
R ichard 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 is. Magnificently mixed and mastered by Jens Bogren (who did the same for their 2013 breakthrough album, ), it’s colossal, detailed and dizzyingly diverse. Just contrast the epic first single, , and the current heavy-hooky one, , the latter with lyrics inspired by the mating ritual of the black widow spider.
