Monakh

"Monakh" — "The Monk" — finds DakhaBrakha working in the haunted, percussive "ethno-chaos" that made the Kyiv quartet one of Ukraine's most arresting cultural exports. The sound is built from the ground up: insistent hand-drum and frame-drum patterns, a droning cello, and the group's astonishing vocal arrangements, where ancient Ukrainian village polyphony — those keening, open-throated, microtonally bending female harmonies — collides with looped, almost trance-inducing rhythm. It is folk music wrenched out of the museum and made strange, dark, and contemporary. The atmosphere is ritualistic and incantatory, more spell than song, the repetitions building a hypnotic intensity that can tip from meditative to ferocious. The image of the monk threads through it as a figure of solitude, devotion, and withdrawal from the world, the lyric working less as narrative than as invocation, syllables and refrains chanted until meaning dissolves into pure sound. DakhaBrakha's whole project — towering wool hats, theatrical staging, a refusal of easy categorization — frames Ukrainian tradition as something living and avant-garde, a stance that took on fierce political weight as the band became cultural ambassadors during the country's war. Best heard loud and immersive, in headphones or a darkened venue, it is music that puts you inside a rite whose language you don't need to speak to feel.