The Belarusian new wave band’s latest album is an austere gothic dream with no interest in pandering to the audience attracted by their improbable TikTok breakthrough.
It’s impossible to talk about Molchat Doma without mentioning TikTok. This year, the Belarusian new wave band’s shadowy, wriggling “Судно (Sudno),” from their 2018 album Этажи, unpredictably sprouted as a meme and racked up more than 150,000 associated TikToks. Some videos—outfit try-ons, armpit hair dye jobs—are presumably unrelated, but many involve images of Eastern Europeans vibing as Americans yearn for the same vibes in the comments section. The song’s principal association is of a post-Soviet lifestyle that’s vaguely anti-establishment, bare-bones yet filled with techno, a nebulous aesthetic aided by the fact that the majority of Americans don’t understand Russian.
Molchat Doma’s newest and third album Monument doesn’t pander to their broadened audience with English-language lyrics or “Судно” copies. Instead, it brings the ’80s gothic dream the band first envisioned on 2017’s understated С Крыш Наших Домов to an anxious, glossy head. The performances sound more confident, the music less muddy. Singer Egor Shkutko’s grumbly baritone is better controlled, packing the intensity of a Russian Ian Curtis. There’s even a bit of maximalist sparkle coming off “Дискотека / Discoteque,” where an eager flurry of keyboard accompanies Shkutko as he sings about dancing fervently at a house party. It’s a bright pop sentiment on a song that sounds like the Cure, or like-minded Russian new wave messengers Buerak, and its earnestness makes for a welcome break from the band’s usual chilliness.
But Molchat Doma does despondency well, even with song titles as amusingly explicit as “Ленинградский Блюз / Leningradskiy Blues,” a tinny, sleepy track detailing a doomed love that spans centuries. Shkutko often fixates on ghost stories like these, pleading with someone he has wronged to let him drown peacefully in “Утонуть / Utonut’,” or mythologizing a lover as he reconciles with his own mistakes on “Звезды / Zvezdy.” TikTok has equated Molchat Doma with a more debonair darkness; Monuments makes their solemn intensity clear.
As an American with a Bulgarian mom, I recognize the aesthetic appeal of Eastern Europe firsthand. Whenever I visit Bulgaria, I find myself Instagram-ing the crumbly cobblestone or chipped Cyrillic signs, and my baba looks at what I’m photographing and asks why. It has to do with contrast: America builds enough Apple Stores and gentrification condos to convince you that society isn’t crumbling, while Eastern Europe is mostly too poor to keep up pretenses. My fellow members of Gen Z, who’ve grown up surrounded by social media and its warring obsessions with authenticity and artifice, resent that. America is nothing if not inauthentic.
And yet, when it comes to international music, young Americans can’t help projecting. A notoriously monolingual crowd may have a hard time accepting Molchat Doma’s music as art with a particular historical and cultural context, not just a vehicle for a romanticized socialist fantasy—something that people on TikTok have already noticed and decried. It’s also hard to say why Molchat Doma is the object of American obsession, especially when Eastern Europe’s coldwave renaissance is filled with bands that sound a lot like them. Maybe it’s the way Shkutko sings like he’s reading his last will, or the grim precision of the drum machine. Molchat Doma’s music is so mystically self-possessed that it’s hard not to wish you were part of the magic, too.
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