URNE recorded their third album with SikTh’s Justin Hill at the helm. “I feel like I’m in Metallica in 1988 with what we do,” says Nally. Big words. In 1988, Metallica released …And Justice for All, one of the biggest-selling metal albums ever made. URNE, by comparison, are still trying to shake their underrated label. But the confidence isn’t entirely unearned. Hill knows how to make heavy music sound huge without strangling it, and Setting Fire to the Sky benefits from that clarity. Joe Nally’s voice sits higher in the mix than it did on A Feast on Sorrow, and the guitars have room to breathe between the crush. James Cook’s snare cracks like a whip. Everything sounds expensive.
Be Not Dismayed opens with acoustic guitar, a fake-out that lasts maybe twenty seconds before the band kicks in properly. Nally’s clean vocals have improved, no question. He’s found a mid-range that works, something between a croon and a bellow. The screams are there too, ragged and committed, but it’s the melodic stuff that shows growth. Whether that growth points in the right direction depends on how you feel about Mastodon.
The Mastodon thing is unavoidable. Nally’s clean tone borrows heavily from Troy Sanders, which makes Harken the Waves, the nine-minute centrepiece featuring Sanders himself, feel either like clever torch-passing or an uncomfortable audition. The song works despite that tension. It churns through sections without losing momentum, and Sanders and Nally trade lines in a way that highlights their similarities rather than trying to hide them. The riff at the 1:20 mark is legitimately sticky, the kind of thing that’ll rattle around your skull for days. But the song also crystallizes the album’s central problem. URNE sound phenomenally competent playing this style of progressive sludge, but competence and identity aren’t the same thing.
The Ancient Horizon suggests what the band might sound like if they leaned harder into their own instincts. The song builds slowly, layering darkness on darkness, before erupting into a solo that feels genuinely unhinged. Angus Neyra’s playing throughout the album is sharp, sometimes thrash-inflected, occasionally borrowing from death metal’s playbook. On Towards the Harmony Hall, he delivers riffs that could stack up against Dave Mustaine’s work, which isn’t saying much these days but still. The second half of that track shifts into melancholy territory, almost Opeth-like, and it’s one of the few moments where URNE feel like they’re reaching for something beyond their stated influences.
The title track spans nearly seven minutes and uses every second. It stomps, it spirals, it threatens to collapse under its own weight before pulling back. This is URNE at their most progressive, willing to let sections breathe and develop rather than hammering through verse-chorus structures. The Spirit, Alive does something similar with its central churn, packing the album’s catchiest hook into a framework that refuses to sit still. These longer tracks justify their length. The shorter ones sometimes don’t.
Weeping to the World and a few others fall into patterns that start to feel repetitive by the album’s back half. Chuggy opening riff, scream-to-clean vocal trade-offs, lyrics about perseverance that sound uplifting but don’t actually say much. “Be not dismayed and carry this torch forward” is the kind of line that fills space without meaning anything specific. The band’s earlier work had more grit in its details, more personality in its choices. This album smooths some of that away in favour of broader appeal.
Breathe, the closer featuring cellist Jo Quail, aims for poignancy and mostly lands there. It’s the album’s only moment of real stillness, percussion-free and draped in melancholy. Quail’s cello adds texture without overwhelming Nally’s vocals, which sound genuinely vulnerable here. The song works as a palate cleanser after eight tracks of relentless heaviness, even if it doesn’t feel essential to the album’s arc.
URNE have gotten tighter, louder, more polished. They’ve also gotten safer. The raw, post-hardcore edge that made Serpent & Spirit compelling has been filed down in favour of something more stadium-ready. That’s not inherently bad. Plenty of great metal bands have made that trade. But it requires replacing old strengths with new ones, and URNE haven’t quite figured out what those new strengths should be beyond “sound more like the bands we love.” The talent is obvious. The songwriting is solid. The production is immaculate. What’s missing is the thing that makes you sit up and think, this could only be URNE.
Setting Fire to the Sky will be released on January 30, 2026 via Spinefarm Records.
