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Italy’s Urna returns with their fifth album of nigh-unclassifiable extreme metal, The Great Jihad. This latest offering, their first in over a decade, releases this Friday on Aeternitas Tenebrarum Musicae Fundamentum.

The band has undergone significant changes since its inception 23 years ago. Their first two releases, Justia Funebria and Sepulcrum, were gloomy, ambient black metal affairs recorded by the duo of RM and MZ, whereas 2009’s Iter ad Lucem saw the band and collaborator Eidulon shift toward full-bodied funeral doom, complete with glacial tempos and waves of grand, despondent riffs. Urna further blended these styles with the epic and atmospheric Mors Principium Est before going dark for nearly 15 years. 

The Great Jihad makes it hard to believe that Urna ever stopped, though the band has continued to evolve in the interim with two new collaborators–Sibilans on drums and T on bass–welcomed into the fold. But it is also clear that The Great Jihad picks up right where Mors Principium Est left off, opening with a monumental three-part suite that crashes and recedes like a procession of massive waves. Several moments even harken back to Iter ad Lucem’s elegiac, blackened doom, eclipsing the sun and plunging the world into umbral gloom.

This is not to say that The Great Jihad wallows in darkness, though. The alchemical arpeggios of “Dream Death, Towards Rebirth” ebb and flow under the light of a waxing moon. Every acrid snarl and cataclysmic power chord is soon answered by soaring guitar leads and gilded synths. Then, in the album’s final moments, the Sisyphean march of “Four Levels of Infinite Splendor” strains toward the light, double-kick drum hammering out a pace in double time as hazy guitar chords part like clouds after a sudden storm. With the summit in sight, the band presses onward in unison, their convictions now crystallized in the rarefied air.

Stream The Great Jihad below ahead of its release this Friday.

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The band shared this message about the album’s composition and core themes:

With The Great Jihad, we as URNA continue the spiritual and esoteric journey that has always run through our music, but this time with a stronger emphasis on awakening and transformation. Musically, the album builds on the fusion of black metal (something we had gradually set aside since our first full-length many years ago), funeral doom heaviness, and expansive melodic passages that have defined our past releases. Lyrically, it draws from Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and other initiatory traditions, following a path through consciousness, creation, death, rebirth, and the reconciliation of opposites. Rather than treating these ideas as abstract symbols, we approached them as different expressions of the same human experience: the ongoing process of becoming something more than we were before.

The title itself is very important from this point of view. In this context, The Great Jihad is not about external conflict, but about the inner struggle for transformation: the effort to overcome limitations, illusions, and fragmentation in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the self. It is the journey from the created toward the creator, from division toward unity, from the finite toward the infinite. That idea runs through the entire record, connecting its many spiritual and philosophical references into a single concept.

Nevertheless, rather than telling a linear story, The Great Jihad unfolds as a series of visions and passages. From the awakening of consciousness in the opening trilogy to the title track’s reflection on creation itself, and finally to death, rebirth, and the ascent through the Four Worlds, each song represents another step in a process of transformation. Concepts such as Nephesh, Azoth, Gilgul, and the Four Worlds are not presented as obscure references, but as milestones along a path that moves from separation toward wholeness through well-established philosophies and mystical symbolism.

At the same time, this is probably our most personal and direct work to date. While previous releases often expressed these themes through a dead language such as Latin (sporadically enhanced by a few Italian sentences), The Great Jihad places greater focus on the experience itself, opening up to the listener through lyrics in English and following a path of crossing thresholds, confronting death, shedding old forms, and emerging renewed. The closing song, “Four Levels of Infinite Splendour,” brings the album back to a deeply human dimension, linking metaphysical ideas to memory, identity, and self-discovery. Ultimately, this is not an album about doctrine or belief. It is about awakening, transformation, and the difficult but necessary work that makes both possible, seeking to share a personal experience rather than keeping it hidden away from others.

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The Great Jihad is out this Friday, October 16, on Aeternitas Tenebrarum Musicae Fundamentum.

Last year, Heart of Winter Festival returned, following 15 years of inactivity, with Hulder, Inter Arma, One of Nine, Krieg, and more, welcoming the festival into the post-COVID ‘20s. After the successful comeback, the next edition is set for early next year, from January 14-16, 2027, at The National in Richmond, Virginia. Heart of Winter promotes itself as a “gathering of Black, Death, Doom and the Avant-garde,” and features an appropriately eclectic set of headliners in Necrofier, Inferno, and Dusk. Scattered throughout the three-day festival are Toronto esoteric black metallers Thantifaxath, the token dungeon synth representative Hole Dweller, war metal favorites Primitive Warfare, and Artificial Brain, whose self-titled album is one of our favorite death metal albums of the decade. It’s set to be a diverse sweep through the heavy music underground. 

Heart of Winter grew out of a conversation between Bastard Sapling members Greg “Elway“ Ernst and Drew Goldi in the late 2000s. “It was a late night after band practice around a fire listening to Immortal’s At the Heart of Winter and talks of bringing a fest to Richmond were already floating around. It just clicked. Our connection through music and friendship is deeper than words and so is the festival,” says Goldi. “I believe it’s totally acceptable to continue a more personal and undercurrent of the blurred reality. I want people to engage and experience as many interpersonal emotions as we can accommodate. We’re just all doing our best. Heart of Winter Fest started in 2008 with this ethos.”

On their 1999 record At the Heart of Winter, Immortal reconciled black metal’s alienation by turning it into a thrash metal epic, rewriting the fortress of solitude the subgenre constructed for itself into a narrative that refracted that isolation outward. They depicted a frosty, sealed-away kingdom where wars are waged (what, you expectedly subtlety?). More importantly, it returned black metal to metal, and Heart of Winter, the festival, acts similarly. It presents metal as it is, in its many variants and flavors, as an appreciation for its rich history.  

Doors open around 2:00 pm daily and headliners take the stage near midnight, so there will be plenty of music throughout the weekend. Rather than head into the Heart of Winter blind and hoping to be impressed, why not familiarize yourself with the three opening acts and a fourth group we’re dying to see. You can buy tickets to Heart of Winter here.

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Prisoner

Sludge metal comes in many permutations, from the post-rock-inclined to the doom-obsessed. Virginia act Prisoner flirt with both approaches, but they’re much more affectionate with the subgenre’s hardcore punk roots. For instance, “Leaden Tomb,” off their superb and underloved 2024 record Putrid | Obsolete, descends into cacophony after a bait-and-switch industrial metal opening, only taking solid form in a well-earned breakdown. Prisoner have the attention span and adventurousness of a hardcore band, ping-ponging in between tempos and distortions. They also act under the belief that genre and rules may not exist but clear songwriting does. They’re not haphazard or random to disturb you, thankfully; the aggression alone is enough. The petty lines dividing hardcore punk from metalcore, or sludge metal from industrial, don’t matter to Prisoner. What does is building a song with strong connective tissue, enough that you can follow to its conclusion even when it cranes and skitters. 

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Ordh

From Brattleboro, Vermont, Ordh play progressive death metal that mimics the spiral in the cosmos on Blind in Abyssal Realms’ cover. They open a portal to a dimension of terror and esoterica. While they’re technically a new group, Ordh has been working on Blind, their debut record, for five years. It shows. Their brand of progressive death metal immerses first and dazzles second, and it’s difficult to ignore flashbacks to mid-’90s prog death. Ordh seemingly evolved not from death metal’s traditional lineage, nor the technical family tree, but from post-metal and progressive rock. Although the riffs occasionally crush, pummel, terrorize, or flatten (your preference), Ordh withhold and dispense them as creatures along an evolutionary trail. Even the gastrointestinally-pleasing solo in the middle of “Blind in Abyssal Realms” feels wayfaring. Indicative of their post-metal leanings, they only have five songs to their name, so you’ll hear their entire recorded discography at Heart of Winter. 

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Concilium

Concilium are among the closest Heart of Winter get to the primal idea of heavy metal this year. That’s ironic, considering they’re a side project of Greg Massi of weirdo metal Kayo Dot and maudlin of the Well pedigree. They also possess only a minuscule discography: one demo and a single EP, No Sanctuary, which dropped in 2019. Who knows what they’ve been up to since then. Likely, recovering their stamina because they compose high-calorie sagas with building action, crescendos, denouement, and gratuitous amounts of tension. Their lone EP is only three songs (with an interlude) and it’s over 30 minutes long.

The Boston act keeps ‘80s sword and sorcery alive through epic doom metal. Yet, while the vocals are laid on thick and the riffs are petitioning to be felt in your gut, there’s a bit of reservation. Concilium would rather not burn all their energy. One could call this typical doom metal, yet “Red Sun, Red Moon” is more alluring than it is despairing. The call from the gallows is, if anything, just a suggestion. 

Concilium are interesting in this sense because they feel like a side project for side project’s sake. It’s a low-stakes expression away from the members’ more brainy acts. They play by the genre rules and deliver what’s implied, though they’re happy to do so. On No Sanctuary, as they will at Heart of Winter, they’re nonchalantly saluting the doom progenitors without attempting to outshine them.  

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Pale Misery

It’s best to refer to the Louisiana-based Pale Misery’s take on blackened crust as crusty black metal. The distinction matters. Their debut release Black Candles Gutter Scum, frames the dichotomy of their ancestral musical DNA; filthy and urban, opaque and shadow-lit. It’s HM-2 black metal, with riffs plundered from Swedish death metal and molded to fit punk song titles like “Live Fast and Die.” The pairing is mainly skin-deep, though it strikes as purposefully anachronistic rather than trying to find a shared member of the genre bloodline. 

Their subsequent release, Black Starless Sky, evolves past said anachronism. Pale Misery identified their sound and honed it, no longer feeling like they transposed one medium into the atmosphere of another, apparent on the aptly named “The Thirst for Holy Blood.” It encodes reverbed chanting vocals and church organ synthesizers into single-note crust riffs. Though American black metal has specific geographic ties, Black Starless Sky is distinctly inner-city USA, reckoning with industrialization, casting Scandinavian traits into squatter’s warehouses, surrounded by concrete and smog. As such, Pale Misery are the ideal band for a metal festival that takes place in a city centre.

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Heart of Winter takes place January 14-16. Get tickets here.

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