Zemfira wrote the soundtrack of an anxious state

The singer released a new mini-album

Zemfira’s new EP was released on the eve of the start of her European tour, and this release can probably be called part of the musical campaign that the singer is starting abroad for the first time in her career. However, the new location of the singer had little effect on her as a composer and poet. Zemfira is still in an enviable author’s form.

Four new songs published on the release of “Ot Luka” can be called a joint creation of Zemfira and her nephew Artur Ramazanov-Ostapenko. The related tandem shared authorship and as a result, Zemfira composed the words and music for the songs “II” and “My Friend”, Arthur completely wrote “Time Does Not Spare”, and “Aperol” was the result of their joint efforts. Arthur also played almost all the instruments (of the invited participants in the recording, only saxophonist Hugo Lee was noted), and recorded backing vocals for “Time Does Not Spare” and “Aperol”.

The sound of Zemfira’s songs has not yet emerged from the shadow of her last year’s album Borderline. The singer generously loaded her seventh studio album with gloom and experiments, including songs that seemed completely inappropriate to each other in the set list, which, incidentally, became one of the release concepts. The sound of “Ot Luka” can hardly be reproached for being too radical – Zemfira has already done all this in the studio – however, the songs turned out to be very different and none of them seems to be a passing one.

The singer’s perfectionism often created the feeling that when recording new material, she was trying to break through all possible walls. But not in this case. Not without the help of his musically gifted nephew, Zemfira rather famously juggles styles and techniques, but does it very unobtrusively. As a result, drum machines get along well with the saxophone, the old-fashioned guitar rock does not tire at all, the slightly pathos arrangement in Aperol surprises rather than confuses, and the false finale and what follows it in the final track “My Friend” turns the song into a creepy thriller.

And there are still a lot of emotions in these compositions. They are in Zemfira’s ringing voice, and in irresistibly simple melodies, and in lines where, after more than two decades of a rock career, life is still in full swing.

After the release of the already mentioned “Borderline”, many wrinkled their noses and asked: “And what is going on in this Zemfira’s head?” Quite a bit of time has passed and the question has lost its relevance, because something similar is now in the minds of all of us.

“Cities are burning non-stop, everyone is afraid of the red button, dark time, bitter time”, “We will be together until death separates, you have to be patient a little longer, because time does not spare”, “And in this world no one is eternal except us, in We dance live like it’s the last time.”

Zemfira, especially lately, is hard to reproach for a rosy outlook on life, but right now her own demons seem to have become common. Which, by the way, is confirmed by statistics. According to some polls, up to seventy percent of Russians feel anxiety, and Zemfira seems to have created the perfect soundtrack for this condition.

Songs, especially written by people who are not indifferent, often acquire new meanings over time and sometimes surprisingly coincide with events that, it would seem, have nothing to do with. I would like to hope that in the future we will all have a completely different look at the tracks from the Ot Luka mini-album. It would be better to start thinking of them as a complex poetic reflection, and not as a reaction to news reports.