Ukrainian symphonic progressive metal outfit Ignea have queued up “Dreams Of Lands Unseen” as the lead single from their new album “Monumental“. That new effort isn’t scheduled to arrive until October 23rd through Napalm Records, so this track and future singles to come will have some heavy lifting ahead of them.
Despite sharing it’s name with the band’s previous 2023 concept album, this song is instead a part of the band’s new chapter.
Vocalist Helle Bohdanova explained:
“This song is about the blend of ambition and illusion, where space wasn’t an escape but a conquest shaped by ideology and dreams. Across Ukraine and many post-Soviet countries, mosaics still depict this promised future: cosmonauts, rockets, bold visions of worlds yet unseen. We shot the video in black and white on purpose, reaching for the vibe of old sci-fi rather than modern blockbuster spectacle, using Cooke Varotal lenses, the optics favored by Kubrick. In the end, I think the song isn’t nostalgic for space exploration itself, so much as for an aesthetic that was itself already nostalgic, looking back at a future that was already passing. Still, I guess each of us has dreamt of becoming an astronaut at least once… haven’t you?”
As for the video, the band employed costumes that were recently destroyed in a Russian strike on a building that housed the band’s headquarters in Kyiv, Ukraine. Bohdanova said:
“In the video, actors portraying cosmonauts wear real Soviet space helmets and the bottom layers of Soviet space suits that were also used for stratosphere flights. This is because in a totalitarian regime, sourcing real items for film productions from adjacent ministries was often easier than building fake props—since films were ‘ordered’ by the leadership, and everyone was expected to contribute to their production.
After appearing in a Soviet-era space film, the items remained stored at the film studio for decades afterward. The cosmonaut costumes featured in the video were specifically rented from the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Studios in Kyiv, home to Ukraine’s largest historic costume collection. On the night of June 14–15, 2026, the studio was hit in a Russian strike on Kyiv, destroying the costume workshop along with roughly 100,000 historical pieces from the archive. The same strike also damaged Ignea‘s own headquarters.”
