As part of their recently announced new studio record “Monumental”, Ukraine’s IGNEA now stream a music video for the first single called “Dreams Of Lands Unseen”.
The single explores the race to space during the Cold War and therefore a time when war-ridden humanity projected its greatest hopes into the cosmos far beyond our known worlds.
IGNEA vocalist Helle Bohdanova states:
“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?”
Bohdanova comments on the “Dreams Of Lands Unseen” video:
“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.”
“Monumental” is IGNEA’s second full-length album that was written during the full-scale war in Ukraine. The recording process mostly took place in the winter of 2025-2026, during icy temperatures and long power outages in Kyiv.
“Monumental” track listing:
01. Darkness
02. Dreams of Lands Unseen
03. Presence Of The Past
04. Prefab (feat. COMBICHRIST)
05. What Buildings Dream Of
06. I Am In Hell
07. Between No Longer And Not Yet
08. Harmony Manufactured (feat. HIRAES)
09. Nadir
