By Eric B. Thornton
The first thing that hits you on Pussy Riot’s debut album CYKA is how clean everything sounds. Glossy synths. Programmed drums. Sugary topline melodies riding underneath Russian-language lyrics about nuclear winter, the FSB, and a school friend who killed herself because she couldn’t see a way out of the country they grew up in. It’s the strangest sleight of hand in protest music right now, and the more time I spend with it, the more it works.
Released June 12 on Bandcamp and every streaming platforms, CYKA — which is the literal Russian translation of “bitch” — collects fourteen tracks that Nadya Tolokonnikova has been quietly stockpiling between art shows, prison sentences, and exile. If you’re coming in expecting the Oi-Oi-Oi, three-chord ramshackle of Punk Prayer, this is not that record. CYKA is closer to hyperpop than hardcore, sometimes brushing up against Berlin techno, sometimes against pop-metal.
The lead single, “CANDY DOPAMINE” with Avenged Sevenfold, is the clearest signal of where her head is at. It should be a contradiction. One is a Russian conceptual artist who did two years in a penal colony teaming up with a Huntington Beach metal band whose fanbase wears hoodies to Hot Topic. However, it’s one of the catchiest things on the record. Glitchy, bright, jagged, and unsubtle about how much modern life runs on prescription chemistry. As Nadya put it in the press notes, it’s “kind of a love and hate song to prescription and designer drug culture”. The production sells the ambivalence better than any lyric could.
“Putting your dictator on a diss track about state censorship is hard to top.”
“GORE” with Cypress Hill’s B-Real is the other surprise that lands. Born out of a DEFEND LA benefit show at The Echo during last summer’s ICE raids — a show that happened because Nadya’s POLICE STATE exhibit at MOCA was literally closed by actual police state activity — it pairs B-Real’s stoned LA drawl with Nadya’s clipped Russian and somehow makes both feel like they’re talking about the same neighborhood. “FACELESS PIGS” is the closest thing to old-school Pussy Riot on the record — electric drums instead of acoustic, but the spirit’s there — and “UTOPIA” with Salem Ilese is a genuine moment of softness, which is rare on this album and welcome.
Then there’s the title track, “CYKA,” which credits Vladimir Putin as a contributor — a real entry on the Spotify liner notes, presumably a sampled speech, presumably the kind of thing that gets you re-added to Russia’s wanted list. It’s a diss track aimed at Ekaterina Mizulina, Russia’s de facto rap censor, and the rappers inside Russia who quietly do what she says. As stunts go, putting your dictator on a diss track about state censorship is hard to top.
The press cycle around the album, capped by Nadya’s open challenge to Putin to a UFC cage match at the White House, is doing some of the heavy lifting the songs used to do alone. But that’s a feature, not a bug. Pussy Riot was always a multimedia project.
And if you can get past the genre swap, what’s left is an album that takes loss seriously. “OUTRO,” dedicated to her mother — who died of cancer in Moscow while Nadya couldn’t return without going back to jail — is the rare political-art moment that earns its grief. By the time “BLIZZARD,” a letter to a childhood friend who took her own life, fades out, the upbeat sheen has done its job. The cake was sweet. The center is still glass.
It’s not punk. It still riots.
Pussy Riot — CYKA — out now via Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music. Next live performance: Paris, June 20 at
BEYOND THE STREETS at Grande Halle de la Villette. Follow on Instagram and Twitter.