Ukrainian modern metal upstarts IGNEA have officially announced their new studio album, Monumental, arriving October 23 via Napalm Records. It’s the follow-up to 2023’s Dreams of Lands Unseen, and if the concept alone doesn’t hook you — a record about Cold War space dreams, crumbling modernist architecture, and the ache of a future that never quite showed up — then the guest list surely will.

Pre-orders are live now, and the band has laid out nine tracks that promise to sprawl across technical metal riffs, industrial textures, atmospheric interludes, and grandiose choruses. Monumental was mixed and mastered by Grammy-nominated producer Jacob Hansen (Amaranthe, Volbeat, Amon Amarth, Arch Enemy, Epica), which should tell you exactly how big this thing is going to sound.

A Record Built in the Cold and the Dark

This is IGNEA’s second full-length written during the full-scale war in Ukraine, and it was tracked mostly in the winter of 2025-2026 through freezing temperatures and long power outages in Kyiv. That context bleeds into everything. Vocalist Helle Bohdanova, who wrote every lyric on the album, frames Monumental as a meditation on nostalgia — a feeling that, back in the 17th century, was literally classified as a deadly disease.

“Much of this album was inspired by modernist architecture — concrete giants built to signal progress and a brighter future, now slowly decaying,” Bohdanova explains. “They’ve become a sort of memory box: monuments to unrealized dreams, where the future that was once imagined never arrived, yet continues to echo through the ruins and bright mosaics.”

Keyboardist Yevhenii Zhytniuk composed the bulk of the music, with additional contributions from Bohdanova, and the result is a record that leans hard into retrofuturism, industrial design, and the strange emotional afterlife of Soviet-era architecture.

The Guest Spots Are Something Else

Two features anchor the middle of the album. “Prefab” is essentially a rave soundtrack for metalheads — a stomping industrial anthem featuring Andy LaPlegua of Combichrist, whose voice slots into the track like it was built for him. Then there’s “Harmony Manufactured,” where Bohdanova trades vocals with Britta Görtz of HIRAES over fast, technical riffs and robotic growls that pulse like precision machinery.

Elsewhere, “Dreams of Lands Unseen” channels 1980s Cold War space optimism through march-like choruses and theremin solos. “What Buildings Dream of” is a metal ballad with subtle electronic beats. “I am in Hell” plays out like a retro-futuristic 1960s TV ad — because why not — and “Between No Longer and Not Yet” folds doom metal into dark jazz to capture the specific melancholy of putting a vinyl record on and letting time collapse around you. The closer, “Nadir,” is a reflective orchestral outro that leaves the whole thing hanging in the air.

Stream IGNEA on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6JmSPGvBSjKfB6iaqREtWv

Monumental Track Listing

1. Darkness
2. Dreams of Lands Unseen
3. Presence of the Past
4. Prefab (feat. Combichrist)
5. What Buildings Dream of
6. I am in Hell
7. Between No Longer and Not Yet
8. Harmony Manufactured (feat. HIRAES)
9. Nadir

The album will be available on strictly limited splatter vinyl with an LP-sized booklet, a CD jewelcase and T-shirt bundle (both Napalm Records mailorder exclusives), solid silver vinyl, standard CD jewelcase, and digital.

IGNEA are Helle Bohdanova (vocals), Yevhenii Zhytniuk (keys), Dmytro Vinnichenko (guitars), and Oleksandr Kamyshyn (bass).

Pre-order Monumental now at https://lnk.to/Ignea-Monumental/napalmrecords and get ready — October 23 is going to hit hard.