Ukraine’s Small Depo return from their long break with Pryhody, and the album comes in like a van with bad brakes, a cracked windshield, and somebody in the back still arguing with God. The Kyiv post-punk band, founded in 2014, has always known its way around 80s tension, but here the old machinery gets dented, kicked, and made to run on nerve. Think Midnight Oil’s open-road charge getting dragged through Ministry’s metal shop, with the fumes of loss, love, fear, and bad decisions coming up through the floorboards.
The title means “Adventures,” which sounds cheerful until the record starts throwing elbows. These are adventures in the adult sense: years that take your face in both hands and make you look directly at what changed. Pryhody carries the marks of distance, exhaustion, friendship, fear, and the slow, unglamorous business of accepting what cannot be fixed by volume alone. Small Depo do not prettify any of it. They bang it into shape.
Rozkazhy (Tell Me), the lead single, works through choice, responsibility, and the ending that waits for everybody with a cigarette behind its ear. The song moves with a hard, clipped urgency, as if the band has no patience left for decorative despair. The vocals sound cornered but lucid, the rhythm section keeps pushing, and the guitars scrape at the edges with enough bite to keep the room awake.
Previously released singles Elektromerezhi (“Power Grid”) and Limb slot into the album like old bruises you forgot to explain. Limb, especially, has a tense physical charge, all motion and damage, and its video, made with the music label of the Third Army Corps and director Sofiko, extends the album’s sense of uncertainty, transformation, and inner search without turning the whole affair into art-school fog.
The record’s real engine sits inside frontman Maksym Ishchenko’s account of how it came together. “A year of crisis and profound changes in life,” he muses. Thousands of kilometers traveled. Six months of consistent work in the studio and on myself. Standing shoulder to shoulder with people who believed in me and continue to inspire me. All of this has poured into our new material.”
The band came back because the songs had weight, and because staying quiet would have meant letting the pressure win. A collaborative track with Скажи щось погане adds another voice to the wreckage and keeps the album’s momentum from becoming too sealed inside its own skull.
Small Depo’s music already has a strange second life through Chernobyl Radio in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl and the documentary Episodes: Shadow of Chornobyl. Pryhody should push them further out. It is loud with memory, rough with change, and alive in the way a busted amp is alive when somebody still has the nerve to plug it in.
Listen to Pryhody below and order the album here.
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