The past music week felt as if someone had deliberately assembled it from artists who have nothing left to prove — and yet they all showed up and delivered material stronger than expected. Across the widest range of registers: from major rock bands with a biography the size of a TV series to entirely local infernal madness.
The week's main theme seems to belong equally to Foo Fighters and Europe. The former sound like a band that has genuinely lived through a shift of eras within itself: the recognisability hasn't gone anywhere, but the sound has acquired a new primal heaviness. The latter once again reminded us that ageing can be not just graceful but convincing — so that the new single doesn't feel like an accessory to nostalgia, but as a standalone argument for the band's own staying power.
In general, the week turned out surprisingly well for artists from whom you want exactly what you fell in love with in the first place. Tori Amos is just that kind of case: quintessential Tori Amos, but in the best sense — where recognisability doesn't slide into self-repetition. Atreyu falls into the same category — metalcore without unnecessary pretension, but with such a set of the right intonations that you want to believe in genre discipline again.
Madonna found herself on trickier ground, clearly aiming somewhere with the upcoming Confessions II, but doing so without the sense of a major event. The result is tasty, polished, and quite physical — but still more like a solid house track with a big name on the cover than another pop manifesto. Sometimes that's enough — it's just that with Madonna, expectations are by definition a little more ruthless.
And the week's biggest surprise was arguably Chuma by Ognennyy Topor and Yulia Kogan. Everything here could have easily slid into a fun gag, but instead it turned into something genuinely powerful, almost giving you chills. In moments like these it's especially gratifying that the music week can still not only meet expectations, but brazenly leap over them.
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