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Urne frontman Joe Nally is in record nerd heaven. He’s holding a vintage vinyl copy of Deep Purple’s iconic 1970 album, In Rock, with the reverence most people would reserve for a religious artefact.
“This is incredible,” he says of the record, which is held up as one of metal’s foundation stones. “Plus you look at the family tree of that band, and you’ve got the best education on heavy metal you could dream of.”
He’s properly nerding out now. Deep Purple leads to Rainbow, he explains, the band formed by guitar wizard Ritchie Blackmore and featuring a young(ish) Ronnie James Dio. Which in turn leads to the latter’s eponymous band, Dio. Which in turn leads to…
“That’s where the title of our new album came from,” says Joe, referring to Urne’s recently released third album, Setting Fire To The Sky. “There’s a quote in Dio’s book where he said that he used to stand back and watch Ritchie Blackmore set fire to the sky – it’s our little thank-you to the people that created us all.”
We’re in Across The Tracks, a record shop in Brighton, an hour along the coast from Joe’s hometown of St. Leonard’s-On-Sea. We’re here to talk to him about Urne and Setting Fire To The Sky, but he’s suggested it won’t hurt to do a little record shopping first. Right now, he’s enthusiastically pulling out pre-loved copies of everything from his favourite Thin Lizzy album, 1979’s Black Rose, to original pressings of albums by the 60s soul bands he loves, from The Four Tops to The Drifters.
“I just love music,” he says with a grin, as he digs through the crates in front of him. “How could you not? How can you not respect these giants and the things they did?”
Unsurprisingly, Joe’s passion for music extends to his own band, who he believes might just be the best-kept secret in British metal right now. Urne – completed by guitarist Angus Neyra, drummer James Cook and recently added second guitarist Kurtis Bagley – have been on a serious hot streak. 2018’s The Mountain Of Gold EP was promising, 2021’s debut album Serpent & Spirit was a significant step up in quality, and then came 2023’s A Feast On Sorrow, which was one of the finest metal albums of that year.
We get compared to Mastodon quite a lot, so we were a little nervous at sending Troy Sanders something to work on.
Joe Nally Urne
Produced by no less a luminary than Gojira’s Joe Duplantier, who heard Serpent & Spirit and reached out personally to the band to offer his services, A Feast On Sorrow saw the Urne singer/ bassist expressing complex and unfiltered emotions about his father’s battle with dementia to a soundtrack of sludgy yet powerful and epic metal. It drew comparisons with Mastodon’s Crack The Skye and Gojira’s Magma, yet it didn’t propel them forwards in the way they would have hoped.
“I wish more people had heard that album at the time, yeah,” Joe admits over a post-record store geek-out roast dinner at The Connaught pub. “I guess it was just the wrong time. I have had a few people discover the album since, I’ve had lots of messages about how it helped people who were in a similar situation with a family member. They said it really captured that helplessness they felt.”
He sighs and rubs his temple for a second. “Which is obviously great that they connected to it like that,” he continues. “But I’m just a normal bloke. It’s hard to know what to say to them. So, we had to go another route this time.”
I focused on what gave me joy, which brought me back to the music of my childhood, my safe space.
Joe Nally, Urne
The route he’s talking about involved realising that they couldn’t replicate the emotional heft of A Feast On Sorrow, so there was no point even trying to match it. Instead, with Setting Fire To The Sky, Urne have delivered a set of instantaneously massive ragers designed to be chanted along to by thousands in a festival field.
“It’s definitely a lot more uplifting,” says Joe. “There’s still some sorrowful stuff on the album towards the end, but the overall vision is much more one of positivity. I focused on what gave me joy, which brought me back to the music of my childhood, my safe space.”
Joe is never more than a couple of sentences away from bringing up his musical heroes. It’s refreshing these days to talk to a musician who seems incapable of not enthusing about their favourite music at any given moment.
“I do think that there’s a problem with a lot of new bands not really digging back into the past and discovering what inspired their heroes,” he says. “You love Metallica, yeah… well, what made Cliff Burton tick? Go and find out, it can only make you better as a musician. But I see a lot of hate and dismissiveness online at stuff being ‘old’ or ‘irrelevant’. It does my fucking head in!”
His own passion came from being brought up in a household full of music – classic rock from his dad and soul from his mum. But he was also inspired as a young lad by his godfather, dance DJ, A&R rep and studio owner Jeff Young, who would let him come to the studio and listen to albums, demos and unmixed projects by a variety of artists.
“It was mad as a young kid to see these people,” he says. “One day [Stone Roses frontman] Ian Brown would be coming in, then [Oasis’s] Noel Gallagher would be in the room across from me the next day.”
Joe and Angus themselves have had an unlikely flirtation with the mainstream music industry. Pre-Urne, they were both members of much-missed stoner-sludge punks Hang The Bastard. The latter band were signed to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation management company – an unlikely union on paper and, it turns out, in reality too.
“It wasn’t right,” says Joe of being stablemates with the likes of Rita Ora. “Just not the right people around us.”
Still, the experience made Joe hungry to climb the ladder once again. Urne are signed to Spinefarm and, he says, have the right team around them to succeed.
“I’ve never felt so much support and belief from a label before,” says Joe. “Our manager said this is one of his favourite records he’s worked on in 30 years. That’s nice to hear. That makes you feel good.”
It’s a measure of Urne’s upward march that, three years after Joe Duplantier produced A Feast On Sorrow, they’ve bagged a couple of impressive guests on Setting Fire To The Sky. Virtuoso cellist Jo Quail adds atmosphere on powerful album closer Breathe, while the epic Harken The Waves prominently features Mastodon’s Troy Sanders on vocals.
“We do get compared to Mastodon quite a lot, so we were a little nervous at sending him something in the first place,” says Joe. “We just said, ‘If you like it, that’s great’. He came back saying, ‘I love it, I’ll do it for nothing.’ We thought, rather than just give him one verse or something, let him do what he does with Mastodon but on an Urne track. He was so great.”
So now, with this momentum and support, there’s really no reason for Urne not to fulfil the potential they’ve shown for so many years. Right?
“Yeah, I guess so,” comes the reply. “I do think that there have been a lot of other bands that have been getting the press and the hype more than us for a long time, but I hope that this changes with this record. Then that opens the door for some of the even bigger ideas that we’ve got. We’ve got grand designs, mate, don’t you worry about that!”
And you’ve always got the music haven’t you?
“Oh, big time,” says Joe. “We’ve always got that family tree. We’ve always got Dio.”
Setting Fire To The Sky is out now via Spinefarm. Urne play Bloodstock in August and tour the UK in November.
