Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, your AWK of music, news, and criticism, I am your

host, John Caramonica.

You've been paying attention to the news like I've been paying attention to the news, right? And

it's very, very, very discouraging. It is incredibly challenging to watch and to feel

alongside the watching. It's awful. And the situation in Ukraine, the Russian invasion has

become a kind of totalizing narrative. And at least for me, as an individual, it's made it

kind of hard to start consuming other things. That's been hard. I don't like instinctually go for the

I was going to say the record player, but I don't have a record player, go for the streaming service,

the television show, the film, the art gallery, anything like that. And I've been struggling

I've wanted to find a way to not talk about the war directly, but find a way that we can maybe

tackle some subject matter that will shine some positive light onto Ukraine and to the culture of

that country. And I was thinking a lot about music and Ukrainian pop music, Eastern European

pop music. And I know a little bit about it, but I'm lucky to have a friend, Lyanna, who does pay

attention to Ukrainian pop music and has been for a long time. And so on this week's episode of

Popcast, what I want to do is kind of take an idiosyncratic tour, not a comprehensive, not a every

song, every performer tour, but a tour of some high points in recent Ukrainian pop music,

talk about some of the biggest stars, making pop and dance and hip hop, and to try to understand

more about how pop functions in Eastern Europe more broadly. Because a lot of the borders are

porous, and they certainly are porous when it comes to cultural production and output. So

we're going to talk today about musicians that are popular inside Ukraine, but also what it means

to be a Ukrainian star in the context of Russia, in the context of elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

And so we're going to get right into it joined by Lyanna Sandstein. She is the senior fashion writer

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