For the Ukrainian metal band 1914, history is not a distant subject but a daily reality of air raid sirens. To grapple with this, they have turned to hand-drawn animation to depict a brutal chapter of the First World War. The video, for the song ‘1916 (The Südtirol Offensive),’ portrays the Battle of Asiago, a conflict on the Italian front that produced over 230,000 casualties in less than a month. Rendered in muted tones of ochre and gray, with flashes of red, the animation shows soldiers with grimly resolved faces charging through artillery fire in the unforgiving terrain of the Alps.

The video’s production is as resonant as its subject matter. It was created by the Ukrainian Assembly Comix team, with art direction by Tania Pryimych and animation by Olena Onyshchuk and Rita Bezditko, artists working in a country under invasion. For a band in a nation at war, the choice of animation was both a practical and a philosophical one. With the logistics of a live-action production impossible and the ethics of staging a fictional war amid a real one deeply complex, the painstaking medium became an act of artistic resilience.

The song is the first single from the band’s fourth full-length album, ‘Viribus Unitis,’ scheduled for release on November 14, 2025, by Napalm Records. The album’s title points to another piece of First World War history: the Austro-Hungarian battleship that bore the name.

With United Forces: The Ghost of a Fallen Empire

The album’s title, ‘Viribus Unitis’ — Latin for “With United Forces” — is a name resonant with the history of a collapsed empire. It was the personal motto of Franz Joseph I, the emperor of Austria-Hungary, the vast, multiethnic state shattered by the First World War. The name was also given to the pride of the imperial navy: the dreadnought battleship SMS Viribus Unitis.

Launched in Trieste in 1911, the Viribus Unitis represented a significant naval achievement. It was the product of a fierce technological race with Italy, becoming the world’s first operational dreadnought armed with triple-gun turrets. The ship’s fate was inextricably linked to the war’s beginning and end.

In June 1914, it was tasked with transporting Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife to Bosnia. Days later, after their assassination in Sarajevo ignited the conflict, the Viribus Unitis carried their bodies back across the Adriatic. For most of the war, however, the vessel was confined to port by an Allied blockade, a potent symbol of the empire’s naval limitations.

The ship’s final chapter came in the last days of the war. On October 31, 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, the vessel was transferred to the newly proclaimed, neutral State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, and renamed Jugoslavia. It was meant to be a symbol of an independent future, but that future lasted less than a day.

Unaware of the transfer, two Italian naval commandos infiltrated the harbor that night and attached mines to the hull. The explosives detonated just after dawn on November 1. In a final irony, the ship built to counter the Italian navy was destroyed by it, sinking with hundreds of sailors and the hopes for a peaceful transition of power. Its sinking is a historical echo of a recurring Ukrainian tragedy: a dream of sovereignty extinguished by a larger power at the very moment of its birth.

1914: A Chronicle Written in Mud and Blood

The band’s origins are rooted in a moment of historical convergence. It was formed in Lviv in the summer of 2014, a year that marked both the centenary of the First World War and Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine. This confluence of past and present has informed the artistic mission of the group’s founder and frontman, Dmytro Kumar.

His connection to the subject is not that of a casual enthusiast; Kumar is a war archaeologist who has spent years excavating the remains of soldiers from the Great War in western Ukraine. His work directly informs his music. “I dig up dead soldiers,” he said in an early interview, “and wrote songs about their fate, silent death, their feelings and fear.”

That visceral connection to the past is evident in the band’s first two albums, ‘Eschatology of War’ (2015) and ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ (2018). With a dense, punishing blend of doom and blackened death metal, tracks like ‘Verdun’ and ‘Passchenhell’ immerse the listener in some of history’s most brutal battlefields. The records were received by critics as historically rigorous documents of industrial-scale slaughter, their focus fixed on the finality of death.

But a thematic shift began to emerge with their third album, ‘Where Fear and Weapons Meet,’ released in October 2021. The music remained intense, but the narratives started to pivot from death to endurance. The album paid tribute to the valor of the all-Black American regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters and, on another track featuring guest vocals from Nick Holmes of the British band Paradise Lost, presented a heart-wrenching letter from a commander to a fallen soldier’s mother. The record introduced a new depth of pathos to their work, acknowledging the stories of life that persist even in scenes of horror.

In retrospect, that evolution seems eerily prescient. Released just four months before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the album’s focus on resilience served as an unintended preparation for the emotional armor their country would soon require.

The new album, ‘Viribus Unitis,’ is the deliberate continuation of this journey. Its narrative follows a Ukrainian soldier from Lviv through the Great War, but its focus is on camaraderie and survival. It is the story, the band says, of those who made it home. “Alone, one may fall,” the band said in a statement.

“Together, we can prevail and achieve our goals: Defeat the enemy, escape captivity, survive, and return to your family.” For a group of artists living through a war, this turn toward the will to live is a powerful and resonant choice.

Art as a Counter-Mythology

The band’s work is also a product of the cultural soil from which it grew. Ukraine’s extreme metal scene emerged in the 1990s, during the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. In cities like Kharkiv, a hub for the genre, a distinct sound developed, blending the aggression of black metal with Ukrainian folk music and pagan mythology as the scene searched for a post-Soviet identity.

But that search was not without its troubling undercurrents. Like other underground music scenes in Eastern Europe, Ukrainian metal was shadowed by the rise of National Socialist Black Metal, or N.S.B.M., an extremist subculture that uses the genre’s aesthetics to promote neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies. The association of influential bands like Nokturnal Mortum with such ideas has left a complex and often-disputed legacy.

Against this backdrop, the music of 1914 becomes a deliberate ideological rebuttal. The band has been unequivocal in its public rejection of fascism. But its most potent rebuttal is artistic.

The concept of ‘Viribus Unitis’ acts as a form of counter-mythology. By creating a narrative that follows a Ukrainian soldier fighting alongside a diverse coalition of peoples — including Poles, Hungarians, Slovenes, Czechs, Jews and Croats — the band champions a pluralistic vision of shared struggle. It is a vision that stands in direct opposition to the mono-ethnic fantasies of the far right, a quiet battle for the soul of a national music scene, waged through historical storytelling.

Conclusion

Nowhere is this transformation from historical chronicler to active participant more stark than in the life of the band’s frontman, Dmytro Kumar. For him, the line between past and present has dissolved. The archaeologist who studied the trenches of the First World War now speaks of his own future with the grim contingency of a soldier.

He noted the difficulty of making plans in a recent interview, saying that any statement must be qualified with phrases like “if we are still alive.” The man who once sought to understand the abstract tragedy of a century-old war now lives with the daily threat of drone attacks and has lost friends to the violence. The historical loop has closed: the observer has become the subject.

This transformation has redefined the band’s purpose. Their music, once a historical project, has become an instrument in their country’s fight for survival. The band members are all war volunteers, and their international tours function as fundraising missions.

“We play it to grab and collect money for our Army and friends in the trenches,” the band said in a recent statement, detailing how proceeds from songs about a century-old war are now used to purchase drones, armored vehicles and medicine for a new one. Their music about a past war has become a weapon in a present one.

That mission will continue with a series of live performances across Europe and North America. Following an appearance at Austria’s Metal On The Hill festival in August 2025, the band will travel to Mexico City for the Heavy Metal X-Mas festival in December. In May 2026, they are scheduled for a significant appearance at Maryland Deathfest, one of the world’s largest gatherings of extreme music fans. The concerts are more than just performances; they are diplomatic dispatches from a cultural front line.

When ‘Viribus Unitis’ is released this November, it will be more than just an album. It will be a primary source document of history in the making, a testimony from artists looking back at the trenches of 1916 while living in the reality of their own. The album’s central message, the band says, is about what happens “when pain, death, loss, loneliness and fear encircle you. But you are still unbroken.”

Conceived for soldiers a century ago, those words now serve as a poignant description of the band, and of the nation they represent.