INTRODUCING: Urne

As much as music brings us so much joy there is a distinct sadness when it is revealed that a band is calling time on their career. Although a collective may cease to exist this doesn’t necessarily mean that the components which came together also decide to hang up their instruments. In fact, it can sometimes be the birth of something very exciting and in this instance it led to the creation of URNE and their debut album, Serpent & Spirit.

“Myself and Angus Neyra used to be in a band called HANG THE BASTARD, around 2016 we decided to kind of starting to wind the band down. People were having kids, getting married. The band had been going for quite a while before we joined so it was just one of those things” explains frontman and bassist Joe Nally. “I’ve known Angus for about 15 years and we’d been in other bands previously too, we kind of said to each other ‘what do you want to do now?’. We were toying with the idea of forming another band with one of the other guys from HANG THE BASTARD but it just never really happened so we took a bit of a break to gather our thoughts and decide where we wanted to go from there. We started jotting riffs down and piecing stuff together and we started discussing band names. I came up with Urn but there was already a band by that name. We suggested using the German spelling and adding an E onto the end. Obviously in Germany that’s cool as they’ll get it but to the rest of the world it does look like Urine! We’ve had a few geezers online poking fun but mostly it’s been alright.”

In 2018 the pair (alongside their recruited drummer and long time friend Rich Harris) announced their arrival with the release of their debut EP, The Mountain Of Gold. A release which garnered a lot of attention due to its mixture of varying styles and intriguing experimentations. “I always rely on a lot of different music and sources for inspiration” discusses Joe. “I spent a bit of time figuring out what I wanted to do and I still had a lot of the HANG THE BASTARD influence in me. When we started the EP we were still kind of tapping into that style but that isn’t where I and Angus came from. Before that we were in a progressive metal band called CHAPTERS. We kind of wanted to get all of that out of our system on the EP and then focus on broadening our horizons on the album, which in my opinion is a big jump up and will take everyone on a completely different journey.”

Following on from the release of the EP the band began working on their debut full length effort. Whether you believe in fate or not, the pieces began to fall into place in quick succession for URNE. “A lot of bands these days write in their own homes but we love getting in the same room together and just chatting shit for like an hour before we even start writing. We will bring in one song at a time and just work on that before bringing any other different pieces in. We got the majority of everything written and sorted before lockdown. We had a couple of tracks half completed and during lockdown we had to sit on the phone and around Guitar Pro at home and figure that out as we went along. We’d booked a studio and we’d not had the opportunity to even practice some of the songs yet as a band.”

“When things started opening up again we managed to book the studio for six weekends and just really work on everything. We worked with Chris Fielding from CONAN at Foel Studio in Wales and it was really nice, in the middle of nowhere and there were wild animals running around and you got to stay in a cottage rather than just crash in the studio. It just felt really easy. We posted on our social media about finishing off the album and working with Chris and how chuffed we were with it and Darren Toms from Candlelight Records, who I hadn’t spoken to in years got in touch and was asking if he could hear the album. We were sat there discussing between ourselves, ‘what do we send him?’ as we had to make sure it was the right song. I sent him our single, Desolate Heart, which is like eight and a half minutes long and within about five minutes he called me saying he wanted to sign us! A few other labels spoke to us but they were trying to tell us how we should look and what we should sound like and we weren’t interested. We’re not a young band and we’re not easily swayed by that sort of stuff.”

As well as pushing their boundaries and exploring new territory, Serpent & Spirit is a very personal release for Joe, using his recent struggles with mental health to fuel his inspiration. “I took that period of my life and made it into a story. It’s not really my story because there is a bit of fantasy in there. I needed a starting point and that experience kind of gave me that. Not much is given away with the lyrics. In the booklet there is only a paragraph of each as we want everyone to take their own interpretation from it. You know the film Memento? I wanted to follow a similar concept where there is a story there but it is all in different pieces and people kind of have to figure it out for themselves. Maybe one day someone will come to us and tell us they have cracked it. I wanted to take that part of my life and make it into something positive.”

Serpent & Spirit is out now via Candlelight Records. Read about URNE and more upcoming bands in Issue 6 of our New Blood magazine via Patreon.

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