Alla Pugacheva released the album “PS”

Alla Pugacheva’s new album “PS” is available on digital platforms. This live recording is her first release in many years. “PS” listened Igor Gavrilov.

On Instagram (owned by Meta, recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) of Alla Pugacheva at the time the issue was put to press, there was no information about the release of the new disc: everything looks as if this release is not an event for her.

The public learned about the upcoming release of the album a week ago from Telegram channels that referred to Anatoly Lopatin. This is a music producer whom Ms. Pugacheva has trusted to record her songs since the 2000s. The album is available in all Russian and foreign digital stores, including those that have stopped operating in Russia. Alla Pugacheva is listed as the publisher of the album; rare singles of the 2010s were released under the same brand. As for the singer’s classical catalog, it is managed on digital platforms by First Music Publishing House and, in some places, by Studio Soyuz.

There is no new material on the PS album. This is a live album repeating the program prepared by Alla Pugacheva for her anniversary five years ago (only a medley of old songs was not included on the disc). The anniversary show was shown in the Kremlin on April 17, 2019, then a video product called “That Concert” was made from it for showing in cinemas, and it showed pretty good results at the box office. In any case, Channel One reported that it became the highest-grossing concert film in Russian post-Soviet distribution. Some time later the film was shown on TV. And since November 2020, it has been available on Alla Pugacheva’s official YouTube channel, where it was watched by almost 2 million viewers.

Superstars like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and others are constantly publishing and re-releasing all kinds of remixed and expanded albums from different years, both studio and live, and making huge money from fans and collectors.

Alla Pugacheva is considered a figure of comparable level in the countries of the former USSR, and one can not restrain one’s imagination, thinking about how many unreleased gems in her performance could be found in audio archives, if one had such a desire.

However, her life is built according to different laws. In the last 15 years, one might say, she hasn’t been involved in the back catalog at all. And there were few regular releases. The last “numbered” album, “Invitation to Sunset,” was released in 2008. After that, only a few singles were released, which did not become events and were rarely aired.

The 2019 program featured many songs that had not been previously published, and those that were published belong to the late period of the singer’s work. From the 20th century, only “Holy Lies”, “Don’t Hurt Me, Gentlemen!”, “The Candle Was Burning”, “Love Like a Dream”, “The Woman Who Sings” and “Everything is Good” migrated to this show. Likewise, on an album of 20 tracks, only 6 belong to the corpus of Pugachev classics. Not a single song by Raymond Pauls, not a single one by Yuri Chernavsky, not a single one by Alexander Zatsepin. In 2019, after a ten-year pause in concert activity, Pugacheva saw her return in exactly this way. But the audience was not disappointed then, because the concert in the Kremlin did not feel like a musical event at all, rather like a social one. On the black market, the price of a ticket reached 250 thousand rubles.

Pugacheva sang what she herself was interested in singing. By this time, she had already lived for many years primarily not for the audience, but for herself. And now, in reports about the upcoming release of the album “PS”, it was mentioned that it would not contain new tracks, for the recording of which Alla Pugacheva, who lives in Israel, came to Russia in November 2023. According to the sound engineer of the Tver studio “Salam” Igor Laletin, these songs were most likely recorded “for internal use… for family, friends.” “PS” was apparently also released for internal use. After all, the next anniversary is just around the corner – in April. You can please yourself with such a “non-sensational” album.

To be completely honest, reading what Alla Pugacheva writes on social networks today is much more interesting than listening to her new album. And if you start listening, you will inevitably move on to her recordings of the 1970s and 1980s, and there will be music, love, and freedom.