KAUAN RELEASES SINGLE “LEAVE / LET GO” PRE-ORDER ALBUM WAYHOME OUT NOVEMBER 07, 2025 VIA ARTOFFACT RECORDS
KAUAN RELEASES SINGLE “LEAVE / LET GO” – LISTEN HERE
PRE-ORDER ALBUM WAYHOME OUT NOVEMBER 07, 2025 VIA ARTOFFACT RECORDS HERE
Kauan releases the lush single “leave / let go” off their upcoming album Wayhome to be released via Artoffact Records. The album is now available for pre-order.
“leave / let go” is the hauntingly beautiful new single from KAUAN, offering a first glimpse into the band’s most ambitious album to date, Wayhome. Serving as both a standalone meditation and a crucial piece of the record’s larger narrative, the track captures the emotional weight of release—whether that means parting with a person, a place, or a former self. The song explores the act of departure as a form of healing—a necessary unraveling. It’s a pause on the larger journey, a moment of both surrender and transformation. In the context of Wayhome’s evolving fabric motif, “leave / let go” is where the first signs of wear appear: slight tears, faded colors, and the early marks of a story that will only deepen.
Wayhome is Kauan’s most ambitious production to date. It’s fully produced in 96Khz, contains a 22-piece choir and an endless number of synth and fx layers, and utilizes 1,000 tracks at its peak, maxing out Logic Pro’s multitrack limit. Because of this, the production faced many curious issues from the software’s stability side, numerous technical bugs, and other issues.
Wayhome is essentially one 50-minute song. It’s divided into eight tracks for the modern listener’s convenience.
The album is dedicated to journeys in both literal and mental senses. Both “way” and “home” can be interpreted differently, as one can return home after a long absence or just try to solve an inner problem, overcome an obstacle, be reborn, or even die.
Besides all the ordinary formats from LPs, CDs and streaming, Wayhome will be available on Apple Music in Dolby Atmos, a spatial audio format for optimal listening that creates a three-dimensional experience.
Wayhome’s visual concept themed around the journey told through fabric and cloth. It begins with pure, untouched white. As the album unfolds, the fabric begins to wear: stained, burned, stretched, and torn. By the final track, the cloth is unrecognizable—transformed by everything it’s endured.
PRE-ORDER ALBUM WAYHOME OUT NOVEMBER 07, 2025 VIA ARTOFFACT RECORDS HERE
We’re collaborating with visual artist Sofiia Melnyk (who brought the Sorni Nai art to life) to create the tactile visuals for the album art and LP booklet. All the art for the album is actual cloth destroyed and depicted with a camera.
Fun fact – Major arcana tarot cards fit the story pretty well. Starting from The Fool and going all the way through Tower, Death, and The World.
The band photo is taken on a rare camera packed with long-ago expired film from the early 1940s.
ABOUT KAUAN
KAUAN was formed in 2005 by Anton Belov and Alexander Borovykh in Chelyabinsk, nearly 2,000 kilometers east from Moscow into Russia’s heartland. As a young, passionate music lover in a city lacking a music scene, Belov began writing music early, looking to the Ural Mountains and endless plains surrounding the city for inspiration.
As a teenager listening to European metal, Belov was drawn to the lyrical delivery of Finnish metal bands, whose vowel-heavy language made for powerful vocals both sung and screamed. He adopted Finnish for his then unnamed project, not just for its sonorous qualities, but because the meaning of the language, spoken by so few, wouldn’t color the listener’s interpretation of his music.
By the age of 16, Belov had written KAUAN’s debut LP, Lumikuuro, an atmospheric doom and black metal album Belov recorded with Borovykh and later released on BadMoonMan Records. He chose the name KAUAN—“For a long time” in Finnish—as it implied both the passage of time and anticipation. The album featured Belov’s somber and soulful clean vocals alongside sinister rasps, as well as many of the signature synthesizer tones and nature-evocative folk arrangements that would appear across subsequent KAUAN releases. It also established Belov’s unique ability to seamlessly contrast crushing metal and moments of quiet emotive introspection.
2015 saw the release of Sorni Nai, arguably KAUAN’s most ambitious work to that point. Sorni Nai chronicled the expedition of the nine doomed hikers who mysteriously died—killed by an “unknown compelling force” according to investigators—after disappearing in a blizzard in the Ural Mountains in what came to be known as the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Sorni Nai was conceived as a single piece of music, and brought KAUAN to new heights of cinematic musical storytelling, taking the listener through the innocent, idyllic outset of the hikers’ journey to the crushing, catastrophic end. The album received extensive critical acclaim.
KAUAN stepped away from their metal origins for their seventh album, Kaiho, which further evolved the band’s deeply moving atmospheric and introspective rock. The album focuses on the blissful nature of childhood and the transition to adulthood, when the weight of responsibilities and stark truths are realized. Lyrics for the album were written by the great Finnish folk singer Marja Mattlar. Marking a new beginning for the band in both sound and ambition, Kaiho was released on KAUAN’s own label kauanmusic in 2017.
In 2021, Kauan returns with a new label, Toronto-based Artoffact Records, to release the band’s most ambitious album to date: Ice Fleet. The album comprises a 43 minute long opus dedicated to the terrific story from the 1930’s northern shore of the USSR, where a flotilla of frozen ships were suddenly found by geologists. The story is based on real letters, articles and events, and the album is separated into seven narrative chapters carefully described with an included libretto. Together with the album, the band penned a 40 page tabletop RPG adventure to interact with the story. It is available in print together with limited LP and CD versions of the album, as well as a gorgeous selection of merchandise.
KAUAN ONLINE:
Bandcamp // Facebook // Instagram // Twitter
ARTOFFACT RECORDS ONLINE:
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