Bleep

Chances are that, if you’ve been following what’s hot on the post-punk internet these past couple of years, you may have already come across Molchat Doma. The Belarusian group’s second LP Этажи ('Etazhi', or 'Floors') has been a huge viral success since it was thrown up online back in 2018, amassing millions of views on Youtube. Listening to this thing, you can see why - this is a set of sneakily catchy coldwave/minimal synth tunes that coalesce around the impassive vocals of Egor Shkutko.

Etazhi is drenched in reverb from top to bottom, almost like Shkutko’s radio filtered vocals are calling to us from the past. Instrumentation from Roman Komogortsev and Pavel Kozlov only adds to this time warped feeling, expertly mixed and mastered with digital clarity, yet glossed with the dreamy sheen of the 80s. It’s coldwave synthpop with a 21st century sensibility.

‘Na Dne’ opens with a smattering of thunderclaps, and bright elegiac synths pitted against a despondently groovy bassline. A conveyor belt of gated snares and warbling guitars comes through on ‘Tancevat’, and ‘Toska’ soars despite the melancholy of its lyrics. Deceptively danceable to the English-speaking ear, the album is full of choruses that are hard not to belt out, whether you know the language or not.

If any one song is responsible for Molchat Doma’s rise to stardom, it has to be ‘Sudno (Boris Ryzhy)’. Soundtracking hundreds of thousands of videos on TikTok, its clustered drum machines and urgent delivery are primed for timelessness. As though displaced forty years into the future, Etazhi has all the makings of a classic, and Molchat Doma have the following to prove it.