Throughout the autumn of 2024, the well-known Ukrainian band The Hardkiss, led by front woman Julia Sanina, toured North America and Europe. Like other Ukrainian rock musicians, they have been earning money for themselves and for the Ukrainian war effort, spreading the word that international rock fans need to pay attention to the Ukrainian scene. Their appearances at top venues such as New York’s Melrose Ballroom in Queens and Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go place them among the music’s elite groups.

Fame and fortune are hardly new to Sanina and her bandmates. Now in her 30s, she grew up in a musical family in Kyiv, initially performing on stage when she was three. At 15, she completed studies at Kyiv’s Music School of Jazz and Variety Art and earned a graduate degree in folklore at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv a few years later.

Sanina started performing as a vocalist for children’s groups and big bands before developing her own style as a vocalist in the group Sister Siren. In late 2011, she teamed up with her future husband, producer Valeriy Bebko, as the pop duo Val & Sanina, performing in Russian and gaining notice in Russia and in Ukraine for their experimental music videos. Soon, they changed their band’s name to The Hardkiss and turned to a harder-edged format while performing in English. 

Success with their first music video, Babylon, earned a contract with Sony BMG and, eventually, opportunities to open concerts for visiting American and British rock groups performing in Kyiv. Awards and sales piled up and, in 2016, they were the runner-up in the Ukrainian national selection for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Throughout these years, The Hardkiss established itself as a leading Ukrainian alternative rock and metal group with tough songs about personal love and loss. Sanina’s hard-bitten performance persona seems a long way from her early days with children’s groups and big bands. Her lyrics, often written in collaboration with her husband, emerge from a more softhearted space, one perhaps closer to her roots in jazzy ballads. 

As Iryna Kalenska wrote a year ago in the German international music magazine Reflections of Darkness, “The Hardkiss is a mixture of seemingly incompatible heavy arrangements, melodic parts, deep lyrics and Yulia Sanina’s soulful vocals.” This combination of tough and tender, visceral and poignant spoke to her generation growing up in a Ukraine that, at times, disappointed more than it achieved. 

Well-known Ukrainian rock groups such as The Hardkiss have promoted themselves and their country on extended tours since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Together, they have established Ukrainian rock as a genre worthy of fan attention through their North American and European visits. A war launched by aggressors intending to bury Ukrainian cultural identity has had the opposite effect. Leading venues that once overlooked Ukrainian rock achievement now book the groups to enthusiastic audiences. 

The war has prompted artists like Sanina to expand their music beyond their previous focus on love, loss, and the difficulties of growing into adulthood. They now give voice to their generation’s wartime trauma. In the 2023 music video for “Festival,” Sanina combined lyrics about untrustworthy love with thoughts of war. Filmed in wartime Kyiv, the singer wanders the city’s bleak streets, proclaiming, “Oh my God / Hear me tonight / Turn these bombshells into fireworks / Bullets into raindrops / Our pain into my songs / I wanna feel this world as festival.” 

The video closes with Sanina standing under a spectacular fireworks display. While they wait for such a moment to arrive in life as well as song, The Hardkiss and other leading Ukrainian rock bands are performing to ensure that the world will not forget them.

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.