FAUNA present an excerpt from the epic over 16-minute long track ‘Labyrinths‘ as the next advance single taken from the forthcoming album “Ochre & Ash“.
The Cascadian black metal duo’s fourth full-length has been chalked up for release on September 26, 2025.
Pre-sale link: http://lnk.spkr.media/fauna-ochre-ash
FAUNA comment: “The portal opens – not without, but within the very center of our being. We tumble inward in toric inversion, spirit turning inside out, outside in; an ouroboros of Being cycled through its own orifice, through and beyond all semblance of possibility”, vocalist, guitarist, and bass player Echtra writes on behalf of the duo. “The vortex ends in neither inferno nor cavernous abyss, but cacophonous silence. A desert of presence, a no-place devoid even of space. Absence so total that it contains all that could possibly be and yet lies barren. Abstract potential, bucking and roiling and spurting forth, overflowing with nothing. No psychopomp beckons, no hand extends. There is only what is not. This section of the work crystallized under the pressure created by a spiritual dismemberment. Plunging into an underworld within, to traverse those shadowy internal landscapes, to discover that which is formless within and fall through it into oneself.”
Tracklist
1. A Conjuring
2. Nature & Madness
3. Femoral Sun
4. Labyrinths
5. Mockery
6. Eternal Return
“Ochre & Ash” is the title of the fourth full-length from Cascadian black metal shamans FAUNA. Ochre and ash are also two of the main ingredients used by ancient humans to create paintings in caves. The album cover combines these two aspects by using an image from the Cueva de las Manos (“Cave of the Hands”) in Argentina, where the oldest hands stencilled onto the rock date back to about 7,300 BC.
The oldest cave paintings date back over 60,000 years, which puts them into the age of two older members of the human family tree, Neanderthals and Denisovans. When modern humans or homo sapiens emerged out of Africa, they mixed with their predecessors and continued to use ochre and ash to paint images in caves.
FAUNA are animist ministers who take listeners and participants in their live rituals back to the origins of our species, to an age of hunters and gatherers and archaic human spirituality. “Ochre & Ash” is conceived as a shamanic underworld journey, a process of ritual death, harrowing passage through unknown realms, and rebirth into new form.
Although “Ochre & Ash” looks like a regular album with six tracks at a superficial glance, it is in fact intended as one whole piece that is divided into three “songs”, which are interspersed with ambient interludes. This follows a distinct shamanic sequence: preparation for death and then the moment of death, descent to the underworld, a passage through the lands below, and the painful rebirth into a morass of Being.
The concept of “Ochre & Ash” reaches all the way back to the founding purpose of FAUNA. This musical entity came into being in Olympia, Washington in 2004, when a spiritual drive to explore shamanism and atavism, which means the reemergence of traits thought to be lost from human biology and culture, birthed itself in the creation of black metal fury.
FAUNA were formed as an antidote to the alienation of the modern human spirit and dedicated to cultivating lost channels of the human condition. Musically, FAUNA soon evolved into an integral and inspirational part of the sonic revolution now known as Cascadian black metal, alongside and in creative exchange with legends such as AGALLOCH and WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM.
FAUNA view their music as a collection of experience and ritual, intended to shake free the contemporary mind and bring listeners back to a more primal and free existence. They consider live rites as the true main event. These live rituals evolved into recorded echoes simply out of necessity. FAUNA desired to open their work to those who might seek it, and to share their passion for a return to primal spiritual states with people outside of the damp, vast forests of the Pacific Northwest of Cascadia.
FAUNA‘s debut album “Rain” (2006) shared the story of homo sapiens’ evolutionary path, and our struggle to survive in the modern world. 2007’s “The Hunt” explores another stage in that human trajectory through the lens of a mythic hunt, followed by “Avifauna” in 2012 – with the title paying tribute to birds and the spiritual meaning these winged cousins provide.
With “Ochre & Ash”, FAUNA take their listeners on a shamanic journey back deep in time into an age of early hunters and gatherers with a black metal ritual that echoes ancient humans assembling at torchlight in dark caves to spray-paint hands, animals, and tools through hollow bone pipes with ochre and ash in an act of magic onto the bare bones of the earth.
Band: Fauna
Album title: Ochre & Ash
Release date: September 26, 2025
Style: Black Metal
Label: Lupus Lounge
Review Impact Date: August 25, 2025
Line-up
Vines – vocals, guitar, drums
Echtra – vocals, guitar, bass
Recorded by Vines and Echtra at Oneiria in Olympia, WA (US)
Mixed by Vines at Oneiria in Olympia, WA (US)
Mastered by James Plotkin at Plotkinworks in Bethlehem, PA (US)
Cover artwork modified from the original Creative Commons photo by Mariano Cecowski on the Wikipedia page “Cueva de las Manos”.
Layout by Vines
Available formats
“Ochre & Ash” is available as a Digisleeve CD, as a Gatefold black vinyl 2LP, and as a Gatefold ox blood red vinyl 2LP.
Shop
http://lnk.spkr.media/fauna-ochre-ash
