MetalProgressive Rock
Ignea release “Monumental” today, nine tracks out on Napalm Records. The band are from Kyiv and the album lands two days after the video for “Harmony Manufactured”, the eighth track, which they share with Britta Görtz and which came out on 21 October. In the titles the guests are credited as bands rather than as people: “feat. Hiraes” here and “feat. Combichrist” on “Prefab”.
Singer Helle Bohdanova says the song “is a tribute to industrial design, the Bauhaus school, and the birth of technical aesthetics”, and that it celebrates objects where function and beauty live together. She compares the effect to “a tubular-steel chair that has outlived three generations of owners”.
The video was directed by Lame Perfect, who also shot the album photographs, and was filmed in Hannover, Görtz’s home city. “Her voice is the technical aesthetics of extreme vocals, and she has elevated this song enormously,” Bohdanova says. Görtz, for her part, says that “having Helle come all the way from Ukraine to my hometown Hannover for the video shoot made the whole experience even more special”.
Of the album’s four singles, the first, “Dreams Of Lands Unseen”, came out in June with a story behind it: the cosmonaut suits in its video had been hired from the Oleksandr Dovzhenko film studios in Kyiv. On the night of 14–15 June a Russian strike hit the studios and destroyed the costume workshop and some 100,000 historical pieces from the archive. Bohdanova said at the time that “the same strike also damaged Ignea’s own headquarters”.
“Monumental” was produced by keyboard player Yevhenii Zhytniuk, who also recorded it with Dmytro Herasymov, and mixed and mastered by Jacob Hansen at Hansen Studios. The players are Bohdanova on vocals, Zhytniuk on keyboards, Dmytro Vinnichenko on guitars, Oleksandr Kamyshyn on bass and Dmitry Kim on drums.
Text by Roger Estivill