The road feels like a dream,
And it holds only one truth —
You can’t outrun your troubles by walking,
And its fatigue is no simple one.
Doroga (The Road), the new single from Kyiv’s Small Depo, travels at its own quiet velocity: steady, unhurried, and steeped in a kind of worn grace that feels both familiar and foreign. Taken from their forthcoming album REMAKE (out October 31, 2025), the song contemplates movement without clear arrival; a meditation on fatigue, faith, and the circular nature of memory.
Formed in 2014, Small Depo stands apart in Ukraine’s post-punk lineage. Their sound channels the spectral elegance of Grauzone, the restraint of Trisomie 21, and the mechanical pulse of Oppenheimer Analysis, while speaking in a distinctly modern vernacular. “I’m thrilled that it has been given new life, first and foremost, thanks to our listeners,” says frontman Maksym Ishchenko. That statement feels less like promotion than a gesture of solidarity. In a time when endurance itself can be political, Small Depo’s renewal reads as persistence.
Doroga opens with a subdued immediacy. Guitars hum like distant transformers, their tremor looping through air thick with morning fog. Percussion advances with careful measure, neither driving nor dragging, while basslines draw a slow arc between melancholy and resolve. Ishchenko’s voice cuts through with weary clarity, his phrasing more invocation than performance. The lyric The road is like a dream, and truth has but one face traces the tension between motion and meaning, the uncertainty of travel when the destination remains unseen.
Each element sits precisely in place, free from excess. The production resists ornamentation; it feels architectural, even municipal, as if assembled from the same materials that built the city itself. What results is a sonic infrastructure designed for endurance, that finds dignity in stillness, in persistence, in the idea that forward movement need not always be triumphant.
Lyrically, Doroga drifts between waking and dream. There are cars on wet asphalt, mist erasing footprints, and voices that promise reunion when the spring returns. Its tone carries both ache and acceptance: travel as ritual, memory as compass. Beneath its calm surface lies a quiet indictment of exhaustion…the endless cycles of rebuilding, both personal and societal.
Listen to Doroga below:
Small Depo’s music operates as an act of reclamation: of emotion, of attention, of purpose. Beneath its sparse construction runs a philosophy of endurance, an understanding that the road remains long after its travelers vanish. Doroga feels less like a single than a communiqué from those still walking, still breathing, still believing that to move at all is enough.
The single is available on all streaming platforms now. Listen to Doroga below and order the single here.
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