Speaking through a translator (none of the band speaks English), he is telling me about the new album Monument. “It’s easier to name songs of ours that aren’t depressing,” Shkutko offers up at one point. It’s clear, however, that external forces have played a role in shaping the band’s cold-wave sound. Saying that it is “fucked up” is about as direct as they can be without compromising their safety. Understandably, Molchat Doma are unable to speak about the political situation in their country out of fear for their own wellbeing. “A lot of kids in their early twenties like to alleviate the stresses of modern-day capitalist society by entrenching themselves in a very romanticized version of Soviet Russia and what society might have been like in the ’80s.” Speaking to Pitchfork, Jakob Akira, a 22-year-old college student explained the virality thus. Such is the band's unlikely reach on a platform best known for Gen Z dance challenges that one TikTok teaching people more about Russian poet Boris Ryzhy, from whom Molchat Doma quoted the lyrics “Living is hard and uncomfortable/But it is comfortable to die”), has over 1.8 million views. chart in early May) and soundtracked over 100,000 TikToks. The following year they released Sudno but it wasn’t until this year that it appeared on Spotify's Viral 50 charts (reaching No. The band are not a retro throwback, having only formed in 2017. Molchat Doma, the austere post-punk band hailing from Minsk, Belarus, however have found themselves the benefactors of a particularly specific niche within this ongoing trend: TikTok teens who wish they could escape their hardships and transport themselves to mid-’90s Soviet Russia absolutely love them. Nostalgia is nothing new, nor really is the millennial yearning for a past they weren’t alive to experience. There is a sense that, having already made it through unharmed, we’d all be safe from harm in the fuzzy days gone by. In times of great personal or political upheaval it can be tempting to want to escape to the past.