Pussy Riot co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova has spoken to NME about the band’s “audacious” debut album ‘CYKA’, as well as the importance of standing up against fascism and finding hope in the hopelessness.
After forming as a fake punk band in 2011, anonymous art collective Pussy Riot managed to perform 30 seconds of their scuzzy ‘Punk Prayer’ in Moscow’s ‘Cathedral Of Christ The Savour’ in 2012 before the protest gig was swiftly shut down.
Three members (Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich) were arrested for hooliganism, held without bail and sentenced to two years in prison. Organisations around the world criticised the fairness of the trail and the severity of the punishment, which turned the DIY group into an international movement.
“Anybody can be Pussy Riot, you just need to put on a mask and stage an active protest of something in your particular country, wherever that may be, that you consider unjust,” the group said in a joint statement following their release in 2013.
Since then, Pussy Riot have released a string of politically-charged protest anthems and collaborated with the likes of Nova Twins, Slayyyter, Rage Against The Machine legend Tom Morello and Alice Glass. Tolokonnikova has also put on a series of celebrated, radical art exhibitions. Putin’s Ashes was based around Pussy Riot burning a giant portrait of the Russian President, which landed her on the country’s most-wanted list. Last year’s Police State, a performance piece that featured a life-size replica of her Russian police cell, was temporarily shut down when Donald Trump deployed the national guard to the streets of California to try and stop anti-ICE protests. “Police State Exhibit Closed Today Due to the Police State,” she wrote on Instagram.
Yesterday (Friday June 12) saw the release of Pussy Riot’s debut album ‘CYKA’, named after the Russian word for ‘bitch’. “It’s a good word, more English people should learn it,” Tolokonnikova tells NME. Featuring collaborations with metal titans Avenged Sevenfold and legendary Cypress Hill rapper B.Real, it’s as fearless as you’d expect.
The furious ‘Faceless Pigs’ takes aim at ICE agents, while the “fierce, audacious” title track attacks Russia’s “state censor” Ekaterina Mizulina and includes samples from Putin himself. “I think it’s his first feature,” Nadya wrote in a press release. “I’m not going to give him royalties though, they can add it to my list of crimes.”
But ‘CYKA’ is also surprisingly personal, with many of the songs reflecting on what 15 years of speaking out has actually cost Nadya. The ravey electro-clash of ‘Blizzard’ is a letter to a school friend Masha who lost their life to suicide 10 years years ago (“We grew up in such a hopeless, shitty county – she saw no future and took her own life”) while the haunted ‘Outro’ is about Nadya having to say her goodbyes to her dying mother over Zoom because she’d be arrested if she returned to Russia to do it in person.
Check out the rest of our interview below, where Tolokonnikova told us about inspiration, ICE and Trump’s America, and why she vows to “create as much pain as I humanly can to the criminal regime of Vladimir Putin and everyone who supports him”.
NME: Hey Nadya, how are you feeling about ‘CYKA’?
Nadya Tolokonnikova: “I feel great about it. I didn’t even think about making a record when I started working on it, it was just something I was doing in my bedroom for myself. There was no end goal beyond making music and being honest. But I think that’s how the best art is made.”
So why now for Pussy Riot’s debut album?
“We’ve been close to making an album so many times before. The first time, we got arrested and it’s not easy to release an album from jail. Your mind is on different matters. In 2015, I was working with some of the best singers and songwriters in Los Angeles but I ended up feeling too far removed from the material, so I didn’t release that either. Then I basically quit music.
“I never saw myself as a musician, I was a conceptual, performance artist. For five years, I didn’t play shows, I didn’t make music but I got back into production for ‘Police State’ and afterwards, I realised how much I missed fucking around on my laptop. It works so much better when I’m doing stuff on my own. There’s no help, just the pure horror of an empty page in [production software] Ableton.”
Musically, what were drawing inspiration from?
“A lot of it came from what I was listening to as a child in the ‘90s, which was a really special time in Russia. The country was trying to be a democracy and I really thought we were going to become part of the European Union. I was a child, so what did I know about politics? Obviously, all those dreams were shattered but I like going back to the memory of the biggest international Russian act TATU, coming on the heels of this beautiful, liberating queer scene that was [thriving] at the time.”
There’s so much wrong with the world right now, how did you decide what to write about?
“It chose me. I was taking part in the mass protests against ICE and the National Guard’s presence in Los Angeles last year. It’s such a dystopian city. It’s a giant Spotify billboard with homeless people camping underneath it. There’s inequality and a real lack of social mobility, but in that moment, people from all walks of life come together to [fight] for LA being a place that welcomes immigrants. I still get goosebumps talking about it.
“The hatred towards the people who choose to be [Trump’s] henchmen on the other side was very real. It’s where ‘Faceless Pigs’ came from.”
So it was more about your own experiences than making grand statements about what was happening in the world?
“It’s always been like that for me. With ‘Disobey’, I needed to write something for the protest we were putting together at the Venice Biennale. We’d been planning it ever since it was announced that Russia was coming back to the competition but I had real writer’s block. I needed to talk about those grand things, the war in Ukraine, why Russia shouldn’t be welcomed, but it was so difficult to put into words. I was trying to write about these philosophical, geopolitical concepts but it always sounded so fake.
“So, I ended up getting drunk in the middle of the day and writing about my frustrations. There are not enough people standing up for what they believe in. They’d rather sit on their couches’ and say ‘we can’t change anything’. Why am I the only one protesting, when it’s something we should all be doing. That’s where the line ‘I’m not your fucking Jesus Christ, I’m not going to die for your sins’ comes from. Still drunk, I recorded those terrifying screams. I don’t think I’d have been able to do that if I was in my right mind.”
Russia at the Venice Biennale, Israel at Eurovision – why is it so important to you that these regimes aren’t allowed into these artist celebrations?
“It’s about Europe not losing its memory. Too many people, whether they’re being corrupted or they’ve lost touch with reality, are being very nonchalant about fascism returning to the world scene. It wasn’t really that long ago that Mussolini and Hitler were being paraded around the Venice Biennale, and we shouldn’t forget that.”
There are some really personal, tender songs on this album. What can you tell us about ‘Blizzard’ and ‘Outro’?
“It’s been a journey for me. The early Pussy Riot songs I wrote with my comrades were all very non-personal. The group didn’t have a face and we all wore masks. But the longer I live, the more interested I am in changing. I’m not the kind of artist who wants to do the same shit over and over. It’s interesting to lean into the personal because it gives dimension to the political struggle. That’s important, otherwise it stays 2D and becomes just another form of propaganda.”
There is a lot of hopelessness on the album. Has that gotten worse since Russia invaded Ukraine and whay you’ve seen happening in America?
“Yes, but 2026 is all about revenge for me. I want to create as much trouble and cause as much pain as I humanly can to the criminal regime of Vladimir Putin and everyone who supports him. That’s the thing that really gets me up in the morning because often, it does feel like there is a reason. The world is falling into shit. Newer generations have no future. Humanity can survive, but it’s looking really dark.
“There are a few tracks on the album that I wrote [before the invasion of Ukraine]. I talk about eating the rich and turning prisons into toy stores on ‘God Loves The Fierce’. ‘Utopia’ was about pushing yourself to think about positive versions of the future. That’s still important but, five years into the war in Ukraine, it’s getting so much harder to find the joy. I’m glad an earlier version of me wrote about it.”
What do you hope this record means to other people?
“There isn’t one single message but I made an interesting discovery last year when I was going through an episode of depression, which are quite common in my life. I was spending my days crying, struggling to work on physical art and listening to audiobooks of [All Quiet On The Western Front author] Erich Maria Remarque’s depressing works on immigration during Hitler’s invasion of Europe. It was such a hopeless time. Germans who did not support Hitler were trying to start a new life in different countries, but were being chased away [because of where they’d come from]. They lost their community, their identity and there’s a terrible way happening in their name that they can’t really do anything about.”
“It’s incredibly dark but it lifted me up, because I realised that other people have gone through a loosely comparable experience to me. With these songs, I didn’t want to hold back my pessimism. I thought the hopelessness would help other people who [feel the same way] and help them understand that they’re not alone.”
Why is music such a powerful tool for protest?
“It can reach people anywhere in the world, versus an art show that can only be seen by people who can travel to it. I’ve seen the impact that music can have through my friends IC3PEAK and Monetochka. They talk shit about the Russian government but are still wildly listened to all over the country as a simple, silent act of protest by those people who can’t, for whatever reason, express themselves any other way.”
Is that what you hope this album does as well?
“I don’t know who’s going to be listening to this album in Russia. I don’t have a huge following in the country because I’m as radical as it gets. Saying ‘send arms to the Ukraine’ is a very unpopular position to have.”
This album was inspired by the Russian music you grew up listening to, it criticises Putin’s regime, a lot of the lyrics are in Russian – what’s your relationship with being Russian now?
“I was born there. I spent a big chunk of my life trying to make it better. In 2022, I lost my hope that Russia is going to become a peaceful democratic state any time in the future, and now I don’t really identify as a Russian. I don’t really want to speak for the entirety of the Russian people, because honestly, I don’t understand them anymore.”
‘CYKA’ by Pussy Riot is out now.
