When Mariana Navrotskaya first performed her hit song Ebalo it was dedicated to her ex-boyfriend. It begins: “I will scratch your fucking face until it bleeds.”
These days the lyrics are addressed to Vladimir Putin, the man who last year invaded her country. Her ex, meanwhile, is now in the Ukrainian army. “It’s for all the arseholes who try and take my freedom away,” she said. “I want to express my anger and rage.”
Navrotskaya is the lead vocalist and guitarist in Death Pill, Ukraine’s best-known female punk band. She is about to embark on her first European tour, together with bass player Natalya Seryakova and drummer and backing singer Anastasiya Khomenko. The trio play on Saturday in Kyiv, in an emotionally charged benefit concert to raise money for anti-drone weapons. There are gigs in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as London, Manchester, Bristol and Brighton in June.
The women describe their sound as a cross between thrash metal and punk. Critics have praised Navrotskaya’s “barbed-wire howl” and called it “a face-toasting listen”. “We joke that it’s fem-dom. It’s music that can kick ass,” Seryakova said. The band released its debut album in February, a year after Russian tanks and armoured columns began trundling towards Kyiv. They have a growing number of fans and a deal with the London label New Heavy Sounds.
Navrotskaya stayed in Kyiv when Russia launched its full-scale attack. Seryakova went to Adelaide in Australia after being offered a job as a sound director. Khomenko left for Barcelona with her eight-year-old son. On Thursday the band was reunited for the first time since 2022. They rehearsed in a studio in the Ukrainian capital, hit twice this week by multiple Russian missiles. “Don’t worry. It’s the bass from next door,” Seryakova said, after a sudden loud boom.
Up close, their music is fast, furious and extremely loud. The band members hugged each other between songs; Navrotskaya wiping away tears. “We are incredibly excited and happy because we will get together to knock out all the shit that has accumulated during this time,” the band posted on their Instagram page. “We missed each other. And now we are hungry for live performances and sharing our crazy energy with you.”
The war has proved an important moment for Ukrainian art. Ukrainian poets and novelists are being translated into English and reaching an international audience. Most Ukrainian rock groups are unable to tour abroad, because of a ban on men of military age from leaving the country. The members of Death Pill see themselves as heavy metal ambassadors. “Russia is trying to destroy our culture. This has been going on for 300 years. We want to spread news about the war and our resistance to imperialism,” Khomenko said.
Both Navrotskya and Seryakova have parents who were born in Russia and settled in Ukraine several decades ago. Seryakova grew up speaking Russian in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia. Her father Serhii has joined Ukraine’s armed forces and is on the frontline in the east. Her mother is a senior civil servant. The family passionately supports Ukraine. Navrotskaya spent her childhood in Irpin, a town in the Kyiv region occupied last spring by Russian troops. “My soul is Ukrainian,” she said.
Two of Death Pill’s songs including Ebalo were originally sung in the Russian language. The band has now changed them into English after a backlash on Facebook and has added other tracks in Ukrainian. Ukrainians are bilingual. The band’s transition reflects an uncompromising national mood following the horrors last year of Bucha and Mariupol. Russian is still widely spoken in Ukraine, especially in the south and east. But increasingly it is seen as the language of the occupier.
The musicians turned up to band practice this week wearing vyshyvankas, traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts and dresses. They condemned attempts by well-meaning western organisers to promote “peace” by bringing Russians and Ukrainians together at festivals and literary events. “Would we appear on the same stage as a Russian band? Fuck no,” Seryakova said. “At school I had to read Dostoyevsky. Why? We need to cancel Russian literature and to promote our own Ukrainian culture.”
The band formed in 2016. One inspiration was the underground feminist punk movement riot grrrl, from which the Russian group Pussy Riot took its name. “In my opinion Pussy Riot is not a music band,” Seryakova said. “They are about politics and performance. They can’t actually play. For us it’s more about the music.”
The war, inevitably, has shaped the band’s songwriting. One new track is called Death to Traitors; another is Die for Vietnam.
Ged Murphy of New Heavy Sounds hailed the band as a “special group of women”. “We were blown away. I felt the same frisson of excitement as I felt when I heard White Riot by the Clash back in the day, but angrier, heavier and so ‘now’,” he said. “Fierce, full-on punk rock, with a bit of thrash metal thrown in and chock-a-block with feminist fury, and played brilliantly”. Their songs were “abrasive and gnarly”, but had “melodies and hooks”, Murphy added.
All three members of Death Pill said they felt happy when they played together in the same venue – something that was impossible when they were continents apart. It was a chance to release the trauma and stress brought on by war, and an opportunity to “fuck the system and Russia”.
“We have more followers in Europe and the US these days than in Ukraine. I don’t know: maybe this is because they want to support us,” Khomenko said. She added: “Being Ukrainian is very cool these days. You feel powerful.”
