Pussy Riot announce CYKA through protest, not polish: a Venice Biennale action timed against Russia’s controversial return.
Landing June 12, CYKA compresses fourteen years of protest, prison, exile, surveillance, and survival into one record: part document, part weapon.
Alongside it, CANDY DOPAMINE featuring Avenged Sevenfold turns punk charge, pop hooks, PTSD, depression, and prescription-culture anxiety into one volatile hit.
Pussy Riot’s founder, Nadya Tolokonnikova explains:
CANDY DOPAMINE is kind of a love & hate song to prescription and designer drug culture. It started with my dependence on anti depressants, but it’s also looking at everyone now mentalhealthmaxxing and looksmaxxing via pills and injections. It’s not a judgement, it’s just an observation and my personal experience with these things is that I have to be in a long term relationship with them for my PTSD and depression.
That tension runs through CYKA: defiance, satire, rage, and survival, with tracks like DISOBEY and GOD LOVES THE FIERCE / БОГ ЛЮБИТ ЛЮТЫХ reading like manifesto cuts.
Next, Pussy Riot take CYKA live to Paris on June 20. Album, protest, performance, and media disruption move as one machine: loud, wounded, hostile, impossible to ignore.
