Some records make more sense once you know where they were made, and ‘Monumental’ is one of them. Ignea recorded most of these nine songs in Kyiv over the winter of 2025 into 2026, in sub-zero temperatures and through power cuts that lasted for hours, in a city that had spent years not knowing which night would be the worst. With that in mind I expected an album of rage, of war, of trenches. What I found was something else, stranger and, to me, more moving: a record about nostalgia, about the futures we were promised and that never arrived, built around the modernist buildings that still stand, cracked, across the Eastern European landscape. It took me several listens to get into it, and there are still parts I haven’t quite worked out, but it’s been a while since a metal album made me think this much.
The idea comes from Helle Bohdanova, who writes all the lyrics and has described those structures as “concrete giants” raised to announce progress and now falling to pieces, monuments to dreams that never came true. The music is almost entirely the work of keyboardist Yevhenii Zhytniuk, who also produces, with Dmytro Vinnichenko on guitar, Oleksandr Kamyshyn on bass and Dmitry Kim on drums, while mixing and mastering were handled by Jacob Hansen. Retrofuturism, monumental architecture and Cold War industrial design form the aesthetic frame of the whole album, and what’s interesting is that the band doesn’t treat it as set dressing but as a way of talking about the present without naming it.
‘Darkness’ opens with synth loops instead of the heavy blow you’d expect, and during the first verses I thought the album was going to sit closer to dark synthpop than to metal. Then the choruses arrive, lifting the song toward something luminous, and the finale spills over with a live choir and blast beats I didn’t see coming. Bohdanova has said the song is about the rides we take into nostalgia when the present gets too heavy, and the video was shot at the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, right after one of the largest missile and drone attacks the city has suffered. You don’t need to know that to enjoy it, but it completely changes the way that melancholy lands.
‘Dreams Of Lands Unseen’, which shares its name with their 2023 album, is the song closest to the Ignea we already knew and probably the one people coming for metal will enjoy most. Drop-tuned riffs, deep growls, a keyboard solo and very rich vocal harmonies, all wrapped in Soviet space-race imagery with choruses that sound like a propaganda march and a theremin that seems lifted from an eighties newsreel. It’s pompous in the best sense, and it’s one of the moments where Vinnichenko’s guitar gets the most room to lead.
‘Presence Of The Past’ starts almost like a children’s fairy tale, with a soft synth melody and Bohdanova’s clean voice, and suddenly the drums come in with an aggression that turns that landscape into something else entirely. It gave me the feeling of riding a futuristic monorail through an abandoned city and ending up in the middle of a death metal pit. It’s one of those songs where the band’s great strength becomes clearest, the ability to change skin without losing the melodic thread, though this is also where I started noticing something that recurs across the record: the keyboards and vocals sit so far forward that the guitar sometimes ends up as accompaniment, and that takes some punch out of the heaviest passages.
‘Prefab’ is the big surprise and, for me, the best song on the album. The title points to the prefabricated concrete blocks that filled the cities of the Soviet bloc, and the song sounds exactly like that: cold, repetition, machinery. Andy LaPlegua of Combichrist joins in on an industrial metal track with a rave edge, crunching guitars and electronic beats, while Bohdanova runs her voice through a robotic effect that makes it almost unrecognizable. The exchange between them is ferocious. I understand anyone who says it occasionally flirts with an overly accessible brand of goth metal, but to me it’s the clearest demonstration of how far the band can take its idea without losing its identity.
‘What Buildings Dream Of’ is the other peak, a metal ballad the band conceived as a tribute to the fragility and inner life of those monumental buildings. It starts in a hypnotic, ethereal way, with a fuzzy bass that reminded me of the aesthetic of ‘Metropolis’, and grows with enormous patience, mixing electronic beats with the guitars until it opens into power chords and orchestration. It’s a little strange, and that’s exactly why it works: very few metal bands would dare to write a whole song about what a concrete block dreams of, and fewer still would manage to make it moving.
Right after comes ‘I Am In Hell’, under three minutes that the band describes as an interlude in the style of a 1960s retro-futurist TV commercial. It’s a bright piano piece, almost Disney-like, that sounds far friendlier than its title suggests, and that contrast is precisely what makes it unsettling, like a smile frozen in an old advert. I’ll admit that the first time it pulled me out of the album and it took me a while to accept it, but now I understand it as a necessary part of the concept, even if I still think its sheen swallows some of the good writing underneath.
‘Between No Longer And Not Yet’ is the longest and most ambitious piece, more than seven minutes of doom with dark jazz elements, built around the experience of listening to a vinyl record. There are Eastern-flavored melodies, a harmonic-minor passage I loved and the atmosphere of a desert adventure soundtrack. It’s huge and full of ideas, but here I feel the band stretches further than it should and that not all of those ideas get resolved, as if the ambition were slightly bigger than the song. Even so, I’d take this excess a thousand times over the comfort of repeating the previous album’s formula.
‘Harmony Manufactured’ brings in Britta Görtz of Hiraes, and it’s one of the most aggressive songs on the album, with Bohdanova screaming at full intensity and a crossing of influences that runs from In Flames to Muse. The two voices together give the final stretch the steel the record sometimes lacks, and the ending arrives with ‘Nadir’, just over two minutes of reflective orchestral outro that leaves the album floating rather than slamming it shut, a decision I think is spot on.
My main reservation is that ‘Monumental’ doesn’t give itself up easily. The hooks are less immediate than on ‘Dreams Of Lands Unseen’, some half-time choruses feel predictable, and the mix favors the keyboards and vocals so heavily that the riffs, when they aren’t the center of the song, lose force. It’s an album that asks for patience, and I understand why some people will stop after the first listen thinking it’s too scattered, because I nearly did.
What brought me back is Bohdanova’s voice. She moves from clean singing to growls with a naturalness few vocalists have, and on this record she sounds more versatile than ever, at times almost schizophrenic, switching register within a single verse. She’s the one who holds the concept together, who makes a song about modernist architecture feel intimate, and it’s impossible to separate that melancholy from the city where it was recorded.
Anyone who wants to hear these songs live will have to look across the Atlantic. Ignea are supporting Evergrey, alongside Stellar Circuits, on the ‘Architects Of A New Weave’ tour, which runs through Germany, the UK, Ireland, France and the Netherlands, among other countries, in November and December 2026. No dates outside Europe have been announced yet. I’m very curious to see how they bring the delicacy of ‘What Buildings Dream Of’ or the mechanical chill of ‘Prefab’ to a stage, because these songs lean heavily on the production, and I suspect that live the guitar will win back the prominence the album’s mix sometimes takes from it.
‘Monumental’ is Ignea’s most ambitious album and, although it doesn’t always live up to its own ambition, it strikes me as the most interesting of their career. It blends symphonic metal, death metal, industrial metal, retro synths and jazz without the result turning into a collage, it talks about the war without mentioning it and it turns nostalgia into a form of resistance. ‘Prefab’ and ‘What Buildings Dream Of’ are already among my songs of the year, and the rest of the record keeps revealing things to me with every listen, which is the best thing I can say about any album.
