Our interview with Helle Bohdanova, vocalist of Kyiv's IGNEA, is now live on themetallist.com in English and Ukrainian, with the video version on our YouTube channel. We spoke a week after the release of Monumental, the band's fourth album, out October 23 on Napalm Records, and just before IGNEA left for their European tour with EVERGREY.
Monumental is a record about nostalgia and modernist architecture: buildings that once looked like the future and now, as they crumble, leave "this feeling of a future that never came," as Helle puts it. She traces the idea to Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life, the panel blocks behind "Prefab" and the Kyiv buildings she tries to commit to memory, "because I don't know what tomorrow will bring."
The building on the cover is real: the Soviet-era Museum of Propaganda in Shepetivka, with a mosaic that is slowly falling apart. After the album came out, the town's official website ran a story that the building had made it "onto the cover of world rock music."
Also in the interview
- a birthday and a pre-listening in Kyiv held partly in a bomb shelter
- why metal in Ukraine is still underground, and bands that are bigger abroad than at home
- the Hotel Salut tattoo and Kyiv's "Saucer" from the "Jinnslammer" video
- where IGNEA's trademark oriental motifs went
- how Andy LaPlegua of COMBICHRIST and Britta Görtz of HIRAES ended up on the album
- four videos shot through blackouts and missile attacks, and heating the studio for three hours to record
- Patreon as the band's main income, and war fatigue abroad
- 70000 Tons of Metal, where Americans came up to apologize for Trump
- languages, Eivør and "Why do you have so few songs in Ukrainian?"
We've followed the Monumental campaign from the "Dreams of Lands Unseen" video and the singles "Darkness" and "Prefab" to the album release.
Read the full interview: IGNEA: Monumental and the Future That Never Came
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