“There’s no guarantee that tomorrow is coming, so you live right here and now”: Inside Jinjer’s new album, Duél

Ukrainian metal monsters Jinjer are gearing up to release Duél, their first new music since 2021’s genre-chomping Wallflowers breakthrough.

Fired up by global events and traumas both societal and personal, this opus – their fifth overall – is uncompromising but multi-focused ear candy, fraught with tension, tunes and talent. It’s probably the quartet’s most finely tweaked and rule-defying release to date. They’ve been honing their shapeshifting metalcore on the road for years but this time they’ve also had longer to think about and record their ideas.

Jinjer left no stone unturned in their quest to perfect Duél, so who better to guide us through the new album’s tracklisting than one-woman hurricane, singer Tatiana Shmayluk…

“This is the opener but for me personally the track order isn’t that important. I can open with any track but there are four of us in the band. So, after recording, the tough part begins. We decide the artwork and then we create a kind of playlist, an order for the songs – and that’s when all the arguments begin! In the end we all decided it would be great to start with some really hard, heavy stuff.

“It’s one of my favourites on the album. The song is about going against social expectations and being who you are even if people think you’re crazy. It's about personal freedom and style. When I wrote the lyrics I had been watching lots of YouTube videos about balls – er, I mean the kind of society balls they would have in the 19th century! I would imagine myself turning up at one of those wearing the kind of clothes I wear for our shows, a guest from the future. I tried to imagine the reaction from people. When you stand out in these kind of gatherings, you feel like you’re not supposed to be there – that’s the core of the song.”

“In general, writing lyrics for this album was one of the easiest things I’ve done. This time it took me only about a week to write words for 11 songs. I set a goal to do at least one per day. I would reward myself with coffee, a movie or a dessert!

“Hedonist was in my mind for a while. Maybe a year ago I saw an interview with a woman who owned several businesses, very successful. I knew the term ‘hedonism’ already, but she took it to a new level. It was a spiritual and psychological journey for her, but now she was at the point where she wore the best clothes every day, ate from silver plates every day. It’s about learning to make the best of what you have got, living in the moment, enjoying the present. There is no guarantee that tomorrow is coming, so you live right here and now.”

“This is about the situation in Ukraine in particular, but it’s also about any situation brought about by bloodthirsty rulers – those that were, those that are here today, and those that are coming in the future. People are greedy for power. It’s dedicated to all the bloodthirsty kings that cause such horror. Your destiny is in someone else’s hands. Sadly, I don’t think it’s something that can be changed, at least not in the nearest future. But there is always hope. As we always say, hope dies last.”

“This was a very hard song to bring together, even the very beginning of the song. If you separate the vocal melody from the instrumental part, you can hear that the Oriental harmony is so distant from where the music seems to be going. They seem to be going in different directions and yet they lay on each other quite well. It’s interesting. I really tried to create a vocal arrangement that was different to any of the other songs.

“Tumbleweed was one of the last songs we did, and I was worried we had already used our best ideas. We didn’t wanna repeat ourselves so with this one we really shook it up to create something new. It was a tough one, but worth it. Like most songs Jinjer make, this song needs a bit of attention. It is actually a favourite song for Vlad [Ulasevich, drummer].”

“It’s about alcohol, and abusing alcohol. In countries like Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, ‘green serpent’ is a term meaning alcohol. I tried it translate it further, to find an English equivalent, but I couldn’t find anything that worked as well. Nothing quite so poetic.

“This song resonates with me as it translates my experience with alcohol. I wouldn’t exactly call it a struggle and I didn’t consider myself an alcoholic, but when you’re on tour you tend to drink before the show and then you drink after the show, and it becomes a habit. You get stressed, so you take a shot here and a shot there to deal with it, and thinking about it, I probably was an alcoholic. I was getting to need it all the time because I get anxious in social situations. Also, I have to speak English all the time, which takes a lot of [mental] energy. The drink seems to help, but then you feel terrible all the time, and eventually I came to realise that it’s not worth it.”

“When I was a kid I really wanted to be a writer. I really loved prose and descriptions of nature, trying to describe landscapes with the written word. Then I started making up my own stories but they were pretty stupid, and in seventh grade I began writing absurd poetry, just finding rhymes to random words, quite avant-garde you might say.

“With this song, I was inspired by a documentary about [Austrian-Czech writer] Franz Kafka and in particular his book The Metamorphosis which I read at school. I may not have cared so much back then, but now that I am in my 30s it hits me a lot harder. Kafka had a vulnerable, fragile personality and I can relate to that, maybe not so much as an artist, but certainly as a person. There is an anxiety as an artist in putting your thoughts and emotions out there, because people are going to judge you from whatever their own perspective is.”

“I’d been reading about psychology, the types of personality that people have. I know that I am a melancholic type of person. The lyrics were written while I was watching documentaries on YouTube about this – in fact, I cried a couple of times. The concept of melancholia comes from ‘black’ or ‘dark bile’, a concept in medicine that once described or defined being in a depressed state of mind. So that’s where this song comes from, looking at that dark state of mind. And that’s me, that’s how I can feel every day.”

“The lyrics for this were written by my husband Alex [Lopez], and you could say this is his version of Green Serpent. It’s his take on fighting not so much alcohol abuse, but certainly its use. It’s a really heavy, aggressive song, one of the most extreme on the album, and is about constantly battling your dark side, whatever that might be. It’s like calling yourself out, taking on those inner demons – who is gonna win today? Will it be good me or bad me?”

“It’s partly about female artists being constantly called upon to justify themselves, but ultimately it’s about all women. Being a woman in this world can be tough – you have to be tough every day and I am pretty sure there are a lot of women who are in fact very gentle by nature and don’t naturally possess the kind of traits you need to be ruthless. They might be quite fragile, and actually I consider myself to be this kind of person. I need protection and care, but due to the world we live in I find that I often have to go through things alone. Of course, there are people around me that help and support me, but ultimately you have to walk your own path. You have to arm yourself.

“The heavier parts in the song are about the anger of being a woman who is forced to behave in a way you wish you didn’t have to. Sometimes to survive you must turn into a warrior, and I really don’t want to. It brings out a side of me that I don’t like – but you have to fight back.”

“It took a few days to get this one to work, due to how complicated the music is. It’s a hard one – I wouldn’t say it is my favourite song, but it has a strong message. It’s about when you hear rumours and gossip about you. It can snowball and you feel totally isolated in trying to prove them wrong. The people that spread the talk aren’t interested in your side of the situation. They want to close the door behind you and do their own dirty shit on social media or elsewhere.”

“Like Fast Draw, this is about going to war with yourself, your bad side and good side, your internal and external self. We always need inner change; a person has to grow. If you don’t grow, life is like walking death. Duél is about me overcoming alcohol abuse, which I was thankfully able to do by myself without any form of rehab. It is about the power of the will, and we all have that. It’s about overcoming your old habits and ultimately I think it is quite a positive song, and a positive ending to the album, because if you believe in yourself you can overcome those bad things. It’s not a violent kind of duel – psychologically maybe there is some kind of violence, but it is really about taking control and becoming a better person.”

Jinjer’s album Duél is released on February 7 via Napalm

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