There are albums that look backwards simply because the past feels comfortable, and then there are albums like IGNEA’s Monumental, where looking back becomes considerably more complicated. Nostalgia here is not treated as an easy escape into better days. It can be beautiful, unsettling, deceptive and painful, pulling memories into focus while simultaneously reminding us that the places, people and versions of ourselves tied to them may no longer exist.
That duality sits at the heart of the Ukrainian modern metal band’s fourth full-length, arriving October 23 through Napalm Records. Across nine tracks, IGNEA move through urban memory, modernist architecture, industrial design, Cold War dreams of space exploration and the strange human tendency to romanticise both things we have lost and eras we never experienced at all. Officially, Monumental follows 2023’s Dreams of Lands Unseen, with Helle Bohdanova writing the album’s lyrics and keyboardist Yevhenii Zhytniuk composing its music alongside additional contributions from Helle.
When I caught up with Helle for Crannk, it felt appropriate to begin with memory itself. Long before IGNEA, extreme vocals or concept records entered the picture, music was already woven through her childhood. Helle remembers singing as far back as kindergarten and knowing everybody else’s parts as well as her own. She repeatedly asked her parents to send her to music school, although at that age she had no particular genre in mind and was largely hearing whatever her parents played around the house: The Beatles, ABBA, Elton John and other artists far removed from the metal she would eventually make.
That answer immediately tied into something much bigger than childhood influences. Music and memory are difficult to separate, whether it is an old cassette your parents played, a record tied to a particular person or a song capable of putting you back in a room you have not seen for decades. While developing Monumental, Helle dug deeply into that relationship, including through Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life and Simon Reynolds’ Retromania. One idea that stayed with her was the strangely haunting nature of recorded music itself: an artist can disappear, yet their captured voice remains capable of stirring memories as vividly as if that person were still standing in the room.
That thought leads naturally into one of my personal favourites from the record, “Between No Longer and Not Yet.” The song revolves around putting a vinyl record on and slipping into that peculiar space between the present and whatever memory the music unlocks. Helle pointed out that even a contemporary record can suddenly feel older once that unmistakable vinyl crackle enters the room, placing the listener somewhere slightly outside of normal time.
Musically, the track also caught my ear because beneath its darker, almost doom-like atmosphere sits a familiar shade of IGNEA’s past: those Middle Eastern melodic colours that played a much larger role in earlier material such as The Sign of Faith. Helle confirmed that Yevhenii has long been drawn to those musical ideas, although Monumental overall deliberately leans toward a more urban identity than the folk-influenced sounds heard elsewhere in their catalogue. That makes “Between No Longer and Not Yet” something of an exception, but an incredibly appropriate one. The melody came first rather than being inserted deliberately as a callback, yet Helle recognised that those older IGNEA flavours fit a song built around turning toward your past.
It is a beautiful example of Monumental doing more than talking about nostalgia. At times, the album actually sounds nostalgic for IGNEA itself.
The Comfort and Danger of Looking Back
Nostalgia can initially seem like a simple enough concept. You remember something, it makes you feel good and for a moment you escape whatever is happening now. Helle found the reality much stranger. During her research, she came across the historical treatment of nostalgia as an illness and became fascinated with the way memory can be altered, idealised and even become a place in which somebody stays for too long.
She compared part of that experience to watching a feel-good movie. For a while everything seems brighter, but eventually the film finishes and you have to return to your own reality. That emotional drop is part of what interested her: nostalgia can lift you before reminding you precisely why you wanted to escape the present in the first place.
Perhaps stranger again is nostalgia for something you never personally experienced. Helle raised the example of somebody in their twenties romanticising the 1960s. They can fall in love with an imagined mood, aesthetic or cultural snapshot without ever having experienced the complications of actually living through that period. In that sense, people are not necessarily missing history; sometimes they are missing an idea of history assembled from photographs, films, records and stories.
That tension between remembered reality and imagined history becomes one of the keys to understanding Monumental.
What Do Buildings Remember?
Architecture became one of the earliest doors into the album’s concept. “What Buildings Dream of” was the first instrumental demo written for the record, arriving before Monumental itself had a theme. Helle initially found herself circling ideas around space: personal space, geographical space, architectural space and even liminal space. Eventually those ideas began connecting with memory, nostalgia and the emerging concept of hauntology.
Buildings became particularly powerful because almost everybody has experienced the strange feeling of returning to a familiar place and being transported backwards. It might be your old school, a university building, the house where you grew up or simply a street that once formed part of everyday life. The structure itself becomes a memory trigger.
For IGNEA, living in a post-Soviet country added another layer. Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities contain prefabricated housing alongside striking examples of modernist architecture, structures once designed to look futuristic and optimistic but which can now appear simultaneously beautiful, dystopian and neglected. Cracks spread through concrete, mosaics deteriorate and buildings intended to represent progress become monuments to what Helle described in our conversation as “a future that never arrived.”
That idea stretches naturally into the album’s interest in Cold War space exploration. The same era that imagined cities of tomorrow also covered walls and mosaics with rockets, cosmonauts, technology and images of humanity conquering the stars. The architecture and the space race are therefore not disconnected themes. They are surviving artefacts from a time when the future itself was being imagined very differently.
Helle described navigating these ideas as almost like moving through a maze, opening one door into another form of nostalgia rather than attempting to reduce everything to a single neat explanation.
That may be the best way to experience Monumental too.
Kyiv Becomes a Character
Nowhere does architecture become more personal than “Darkness.” The accompanying video places Kyiv itself at the centre, moving through buildings, streets and subway stations that have formed part of the band members’ lives.
Working on Monumental changed the way Helle looked at her home city. Buildings she had walked past for years suddenly became interesting when she began searching through older photographs and seeing how striking some of those same structures appeared when they were new. Once you start paying attention to those details, neglect becomes more visible, but under the reality of war there is also another reason to look. Familiar structures can no longer be assumed to be permanent.
During our conversation, that reality was not theoretical. Helle explained that she had spent the previous night sheltering during another ballistic missile attack. The possibility that a familiar building may simply not be there the following morning changes how somebody reads a city they have known their whole life. Ordinary structures suddenly become precious because permanence can no longer be taken for granted.
That is why the “Darkness” video does not only chase spectacular architecture. Kyiv’s subway is included because everyday spaces matter too. Helle spoke warmly about the beauty and history of the stations, their mosaics and monuments, and why IGNEA wanted to preserve those pieces of the city inside the visual world of the song.
There is an important distinction here. Monumental was created during war, but reducing the album to a “war record” misses much of what it is trying to say. Its focus is broader: how places store memory, how quickly the meaning of those places can change and why we so often realise what something meant to us only when faced with losing it.
A City as a Memory Box
That thought continues through “Presence of the Past,” another of the tracks that stood out immediately during my first listens. It begins with a calmer atmosphere and Helle’s clean voice before her harsher vocals push through, giving the song the feeling of stability suddenly being interrupted.
Helle sees it as perhaps the most urban piece on Monumental, but not solely because of the threat of wartime destruction. Cities have always been unstable organisms. People arrive, leave and rebuild; parks disappear, buildings are repurposed, neighbourhoods change and places that once carried enormous personal importance may eventually cease to exist for reasons as ordinary as redevelopment.
IGNEA even asked listeners online which parts of their own cities made them nostalgic. Many responses were not stories of war or catastrophe, but places erased by ordinary change: a building demolished for another development, a familiar area being used for something completely different or a landscape altered beyond recognition.
For Helle, that makes a city almost a memory box, containing layers upon layers of human experience. Someone walking through an old city is effectively standing above generations of joy, cruelty, routine, loss and transformation.
That idea is reflected beautifully in the album title itself. Monumental things do not have to be permanent.
Industrial Icons and Extreme Voices
The world of Monumental also gave IGNEA room to invite two very different guests into it.
“Prefab” pushes hard into industrial metal and features Combichrist frontman Andy LaPlegua. Having interviewed Andy previously myself, hearing that unmistakable voice appear on an IGNEA record immediately made sense. As Helle explained, the band reached the same conclusion as soon as the demo was complete.
IGNEA had met Andy when Combichrist played Kyiv in 2019. They were not constantly in contact afterwards, but Helle still had a connection to him and decided there was little to lose by asking. Andy accepted, leaving the band with what Helle laughingly reduced to a pretty convincing equation: “having an industrial icon on an industrial metal track, what can be better?”
The second collaboration heads somewhere different again. Britta Görtz of HIRAES appears on “Harmony Manufactured,” one of the tracks I kept coming back to while listening to the record. Helle has enormous respect for Britta’s range as an extreme vocalist, and after the two crossed paths backstage through their shared connection to Napalm Records, IGNEA saw the album’s most technically demanding song as the perfect place to bring her in.
Rather than simply adding a guest verse, Helle and Britta divide the extreme vocal passages between them. That extra range of techniques gives the track another layer of movement and personality, something Helle feels elevated the song beyond what she would have created alone. She also revealed during our conversation that a “Harmony Manufactured” video featuring Britta is scheduled for October 21, two days before Monumental arrives.
Beauty, Despair and a Monumental Finish
The interview clock beat us before we could pull apart every track, but the record itself keeps offering more once the conversation ends.
“I am in Hell” remains one of the album’s most striking contradictions for me. A beautiful piano opening and Helle’s clean voice create something almost soothing, while the lyrics underneath are anything but. It is a short piece, but the combination of musical beauty and emotional darkness makes it one of those moments where Monumental reveals how uncomfortable nostalgia can become when you actually stay inside it for long enough.
Then there is “Nadir.” With no lyrics at all, the closing track begins slowly and gradually expands into something enormous. Listening to it feels less like an outro than the final movement of an opera or musical, where themes and emotions from everything preceding it gather for one last monumental sweep.
It is a fitting way to finish an album obsessed with memory. After spending so much time examining the words we attach to the past, IGNEA eventually stop explaining and let the music carry what remains.
Listen From Beginning to End
At the end of our conversation, Helle had one request for listeners: do not reduce Monumental to a handful of singles. She wants people to give the whole thing time.
That makes sense. This is an album built like a journey rather than a playlist, with each track opening another door into memory, architecture, cities, music and the different ways nostalgia can shape what we believe the past was.
Helle also had a message for Australian fans. IGNEA have never made it down our way, despite having a passionate audience here and Australian supporters among some of their longtime Patreon community. She hopes that eventually changes and the band finally gets the opportunity to bring these songs to Australian stages.
Until then, Monumental offers plenty to wander through.
The past may never have been quite as beautiful as we remember it. The future promised by yesterday may never arrive. Buildings crack, cities change, records gather dust and people disappear from our lives, yet music keeps finding strange little ways to carry their ghosts forward.
For an album built around nostalgia, perhaps that is the most monumental thought of all.
IGNEA — Monumental
Release: October 23, 2026
Label: Napalm Records
Tracks: 9
Pre-order / album:
https://lnk.to/Ignea-Monumental/napalmrecords
IGNEA Official Website:
IGNEA Official Website
Napalm Records / IGNEA:
IGNEA at Napalm Records
Monumental is available in CD and multiple vinyl editions through Napalm Records, including a limited translucent Dark Night Blue splatter edition.
