Zivert: “My new album was a risky experiment”

Zivert’s success doesn’t really fit into the standard pattern of how people make careers in pop music these days. Julia was not a young protégé of a large structure or a serious producer; she took up music in adulthood, having previously worked in places that had nothing to do with the stage. Having assembled a team of like-minded people, Zivert and Kº began to take steps in the direction that seemed to be the opposite of success. Instead of churning out music that copied what had made it to the top of the charts, they suddenly offered a retro sound in the spirit of the eighties and nineties, as well as English-language vocals.

However, in a situation where even the stubborn “European pops” Sergei Lazarev considered singing in English to be a big mistake, the song Life at the end of 2019 became a real champion of many streaming services. At the same time, Russian-language hits did not lag behind, and quickly turned the aspiring singer into an artist of large halls and into a desirable participant in prestigious collabs.

Following the debut EP “Shine,” the full-length Vinyl #1 and Vinyl #2 were released, convincing everyone that a retro vibe combined with catchy melodies can move a wide variety of audiences. Zivert approached the new album as a singer with a working musical strategy, so it seemed that her next move was quite predictable. But it turned out exactly the opposite.

“In the World of Merry” is best described as an attempt to do things differently; and this is always a risk, especially in an industry where unexpected experiments are, to put it mildly, unpopular. In a conversation with the singer, “ZD” tries to understand what is happening and how it can be explained.

— By the standards of the general desire for short forms, “In the World of Merry” is not a small album at all…

– Yes it’s true! The album turned out to be not small at all, and this is my conscious choice. It still seems to me that the general trend of “short forms” in popular Russian music today is rather not a desire for them, but a lack of talented material and a desire to hype here and now. I am sure that our pop culture is not going through the best of times at the moment. We suddenly found ourselves in an era of “fast consumption”, where throwaway songs replace one another, and the charts every week produce more and more new products with catchy names. It was all the more important for me to create something worthwhile, a kind of statement album, something that will remain in the music library of thinking people forever, and will not flare up with a bright spark for just a season. It is doubly important that this album became my personal revelation, since seventy percent of it can be called the author’s. In this great work, I discovered my potential as an author for the first time and can finally feel these incomparable emotions and experiences from performing my own songs.

— From the very beginning of work, did you understand that it would be a big album?

— “In the World of Merry” we wrote in Bali together with my musical family: Bogdan Leonovich, Arkady Alexandrov, LYRIQ and Martin Kladkovsky. When we went to the island, we didn’t have any clearly developed concept. All the songs were born in some crazy stream of jams, improvisations and endless creativity. It was some kind of magic, real madness and a time that I will never forget. The guys put together the initial arrangement, and I looked at the horizon, at the ocean, and as if from this inspiring endless expanse, entire verses came to me at once. Suddenly I feel like I’m being electrocuted, I run to the guys shouting “I know! I know!”, I sit down at the microphone and start singing. At that moment, the team that has been working with me for many years sat with their eyes wide open and said: “Who are you and how do you do this?” Somehow, we created fourteen full-fledged musical works and went with the demos to Moscow to record everything we had done in a month in Bali.

— Despite the title of the album, there is quite a lot of melancholy in the new songs, and from time to time the lyrics mention rain, which also gives a certain mood. Is it possible to draw a parallel between the new songs and your emotional state while working on them?

— This album is woven from my personal stories, feelings and experiences. Here I bare my soul for the first time and gave the listener the opportunity to look into my inner world, which I had so carefully hidden from prying eyes throughout my entire creative journey. And this is due to the fact that I finally began to write and pour out my aspirations and experiences into lines, from which, as a result, those songs were born, which contain a huge number of meanings, sometimes double, and sometimes triple. That is, a parallel would still be worth drawing not with my emotional state during the writing of the album, but with the baggage with which I came to it. No matter how pathetic it may sound, I went to him all my adult life, and it was life that served as my muse. The album is full of irony, it is very metaphorical, there is hidden and quite overt humor here, in other words, there is a whole range of feelings that are familiar to any person first-hand. The work was preceded by a wildly difficult stage of transformation, health problems and emotional swings, and the result was a complete rebirth both mentally and physically. New music became the main medicine for me and gave me a new me.

— In the track “Birds fly for music” there is a line “there is nothing anymore, everything is used,” which quite accurately reflects a certain crisis of ideas that have been relevant for pop music almost since the beginning of the new millennium. And everything happens in a situation where the musician must release new tracks at the speed of a fast food worker…

“I am very pleased that you interpreted the meaning of this phrase so correctly.” There is a crisis, and it is obvious. The music industry has turned into a real race for a quick and easy jackpot, when bets are placed on immediate success, which will burst in a few months, and you will again be forced to issue another soap bubble at the speed of light. Fast fashion, fast food, fast life – all this resembles a kind of plastic world where there is no soul and eternal values. Artificial intelligence in the world of technology is increasingly replacing a living person, and high-quality and talented music is being replaced by simple melodies with a basic set of words. That is why my new album became a very risky experiment, because I went against the current rules of the game. But, as they say, those who don’t take risks don’t drink champagne… But to be honest, we just wrote this album keeping in our hearts the love for real art, and not for money.

— In previous albums, you and your team found your approach to the retro sound of the eighties and nineties and achieved enviable success with the public. On “In the World of Merry” there is not only retro sound, it’s as if you wanted to complicate everything. Is there a fear that all this will not be very clear to a mass audience?

“We know, we’re just sure that this record is not for everyone and not about everyone, but it will absolutely find its audience and resonate in people’s hearts. The day after the release of the album, we gave a big solo concert in Minsk and were simply stunned by the sincere wave of love from the crowd of thousands, who were already singing verses from the new songs in chorus with me. I repeat: the day after the release! Here is an indicator for you, a real focus group that produced stunning results. For the sake of these emotions, for the sake of the happy eyes of the listeners, we create.

As for the sound, this time we really moved away from our signature vintage sound, for which we were loved from our first works. I recently told in an interview that I secretly nicknamed our new musical style “avant-garde pop with a pinch of grotesque”: here disco, afro and French house, drum and bass and hip-hop coexist in harmony and love. Well, words are my special pride, interpret them as your heart tells you, depending on your mood and inner sense of self. They tend to mimic you and turn different colors.

— We can assume that dance music lovers will find a lot of interesting things in the new songs. What kind of music do you like to dance to?

— Serious words and deep thoughts superimposed on a dance rhythm are our signature style, the DNA of Zivert, and in this sense, “In the World of Merry” continues the traditions that my team and I laid down in Vinyl #1, Vinyl #2 and other releases. Despite the predominant presence of smoother songs on the album, those who like to light up the dance floor will easily do so with “Gin” or “Joker”. As for my preferences, I grew up on the classics: Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Sting, Sade, Erykah Badu… I dance to different things: from Balinese national melodies to vinyl-sounding funk. And at fun parties I’ll be happy to dance to our hits of the nineties.