Urne

There are times in life when it feels like darkness will consume the light.

Suffering. Loss. The emptiness that follows. An upended hourglass trickling inexorably into the cold shadow of the great hereafter, devouring not only those closest to us, but all the decades of knowledge and memories they held dear. At a distance, we can steel ourselves against the grim inevitabilities of disease, dementia and deterioration in old age, but when more intimately faced with their impact, it becomes easy to imagine some hidden demon gorging on the misery wrought.
It was in circumstances such as these that Joe Nally began work on Urne’s savage second album A Feast On Sorrow. “There were a lot of dark times,” the frontman sighs, reflecting on two family members afflicted by degenerative illness. “Losing people is a horrible thing; when the reality hits, it shocks you. I was full of pent-up emotion – anger, confusion – and I could only seem to release that through aggression. That’s meant this record is much more aggressive. It’s a lot darker. There were quite a few ‘fun’ elements to our first LP Serpent & Spirit. There aren’t many of those here.”

Indeed, that staggering, shapeshifting 2021 debut was the product of a lifetime of inspiration and ideas collected by Joe and mercurial guitarist Angus Neyra, drawing on riffs originally written for renowned stoner-rock collective Hang The Bastard and cutting prog-metal project Chapters, while songs like Desolate Heart were more than a decade in the making. By comparison, A Feast On Sorrow was the product of two years’ intensive writing and recording. Having narrowed focus and welcomed master drummer James Cook into the fold, it became about embracing the challenge and opportunity of delivering a definitive statement on the band these three are destined to be.
“We had new riffs, a new drummer, and everything seemed to be going wrong in our lives,” Nally shrugs. “So we just drew from that. Previously, we’ve been very clearly influenced by bands like Metallica. This time round, it was much more about finding out the things that work for Urne!”

Tellingly, there were an army of supporters lining-up to help. A passion project delivered without huge fanfare or the weight of expectation, Serpent & Spirit garnered a passionate cult following amongst fans, but it struck a particular chord with other artists: the lack of gimmick, constraint or agenda establishing Urne as what Nally calls a ‘band’s band’. From Day One, international heavyweights such as Trivium, Killswitch Engage and Whitechapel and UK contemporaries like Conjurer, Mountain Caller and Tuskar were trumpeting its brilliance or reaching out directly. No supporter was more vociferous than Gojira bassist Jean-Michel Labadie, who would fatefully go on to insist that his frontman Joe Duplantier take the time to give Serpent & Spirit his full attention.

“Joe messaged us on Instagram to tell us he’d heard the album and that we should keep it up and stay in touch,” Nally remembers with a grin. “A week later, he was talking about us in Revolver!”
Having crossed paths face-to-face in Copenhagen, a tentative query was sent out about whether Urne might be able to the world-class setup at Duplantier’s Silver Cord studio in Brooklyn, New York to beef up the drum sound of their second album. As it turned out, not only were they welcome to use the facility, but Duplantier himself – who works only with close friends and personal favourites like Car Bomb, Mastodon and Highly Suspect – wanted to get involved.

“Joe doesn’t produce much,” explains Nally. “I never imagined he’d produce us. But he messaged back, ‘Sure, you can use the studio, but, honestly, I’d really like to produce your band. I need to like who I work with and I think that I could do something great with you guys.’ We were like, ‘What the f*ck?!’ but we kept talking and eventually we had a date to head over there.”
Underlining his investment, Duplantier made all of Gojira’s in-studio instruments available for recording and ensured the French giants’ ‘godlike’ live engineer Johann Meyer would be on-hand in studio. He also contacted the legendary Ted Jensen (a veteran of everything from The Eagles’ Hotel California and Bob Marley’s Exodus to Pantera’s Far Beyond Driven and Fear Factory’s Demanufacture) to oversee the final master. Those gurus’ involvement indicated Duplantier’s pursuit of live energy and classic sound where moments of fret buzz or flickers of background noise were embraced rather than excised, and outside-the-box thinking led to kick-drums full of Swiss Francs and son Orest’s beginner guitar-amp borrowed to harness its killer mid-range.

“Joe’s approach was that he didn’t want to touch the songs, he wanted to create the sound,” Nally emphasises. “A lot of metal today feel too polished. It’s too clinical. You don’t feel it. One of the things that puts Gojira on another level is that you always feel their message, their meaning. The longer we spent with Joe, the more we got to see how his magic works. On one song he mightn’t do anything at all. On another, he could be giving pointers about the chorus or the song-title. Then on the next he’d be sitting there adding extra percussion alongside our drummer. He was immersed in it, but it was ultimately about letting us be our own band. Plus, it was inspiring just to be at Silver Cord. There are letters all over the walls from the heroes like of Metallica and Guns N’ Roses to Gojira. Knowing that these guys were backing us, we really didn’t want to let them down!”
The finished package does anything but. From the evocatively stormy artwork by renowned coastline photographer Rachael Talibart (delivering her first-ever album cover) to the tumultuous music within, A Feast On Sorrow is a body of work designed to crash into listeners’ subconscious.

Blistering opener The Flood Came Rushing In lays down a 100mph marker, painting the deluge of tears that followed the moment ‘You detailed the demise / Of your past and future mind’ while unleashing a hail of cutting riffage. To Die Twice continues the brutalist introspection, begging, ‘Which will die first? / The Heart? / The Mind? / The Soul?’ as it lurches from doomy intro to all-out barrage. The title-track toys with the severity of black and death metal, but branches into boldly proggy territory reminiscent of Machine Head and Mastodon at their breathtaking best.

Upcoming singles The Burden and Becoming The Ocean offer arguably the most immediate entry into the maelstrom, using Nally’s life watching the waves batter England’s sweeping south coast as a metaphor for the pressure a family feels drowning in the suffering of one of their own. They’re dwarfed, however, by the album’s epic, 11-minute pillars: A Stumble Of Words and The Longer Goodbye/Where Do The Memories Go. The former’s bold, brutal monologue from the point of view of a failing mind is counterpointed by the latter’s bittersweet resignation and faint flickers of hope, but both draw on unexpected Celtic influence – from the weeping guitars of Irish blues legend Gary Moore to the mystery and melancholy of old folk favourites like The Night Visiting Song and The Parting Glass – to confirm Urne’s staggering vision and versatility.

At the same time, arguably the most meaningful moment is penultimate track Peace. A 72-second interlude of relative calm amongst the chaos, strummed on a battered old acoustic guitar, and finally delivered by Duplantier via voice-note at the end of a difficult 24 hours that had seen Nally suffering from panic attacks and exhaustion back at home, it proved to be emblematic of the catharsis and closure that A Feast Of Sorrow is ultimately all about.

“The personal story I’m telling in this album is still ongoing, but it feels like I’ve been able to say what I needed to say,” the frontman concludes. “When I listen back to the last lines of the album, I remember stretching my vocals to their limits, screaming from outside the vocal booth, with Joe telling me, ‘Louder! More powerful! I want your voice to break!’ It was an incredibly cathartic experience to be able to write this album, to scream it, to hear it back – and for other people to discover and take from it what they need, too. I’ve got my emotions out. I’ve got my meaning out. I’ve got my message out. What I needed to do is done.”