Urna have put The Great Jihad online in full, two days before ATMF release it on Thursday. Invisible Oranges is hosting the stream. It is their first album in thirteen years.
Thirteen years is the fact that explains the rest. The sessions ran from 2014 to 2025, in Italy and in Britain, broken by a long hiatus and then by the pandemic, and the record was only finished last year. Six songs took eleven years to assemble, and what came out is heavier on the black metal side than Mors Principium Est was, with the funeral doom underneath rather than in front.
The lyrics are in English, which for this band is the odd detail. Everything since the 2003 debut, which was in Italian, has been written in Latin. The subject is the same esoteric ground they have worked since the early 2000s, Hermetism and duality, now in a language people can read without a dictionary.
Our own calendar has the record down for Thursday through Aeternitas Tenebrarum Musicae Fundamentum. A full stream two days out is a label betting that the people who waited thirteen years will not mind hearing it early.