(opinion article)

Ukrainian indie folk band BALKON is gaining more and more popularity, so we can’t help but talk about them. A lot of people got to know the musicians thanks to the song “Witches” (Відьми), released as a single in 2021. The song exploded twice; after being translated from Russian into Ukrainian, the number of listeners again broke all platform records. The Ukrainian version of “Witches” has about 27 thousand Shazams, about 3.3 million streams on Spotify, and 4.4 million on Apple Music. All of this shows the high interest of the audience in the singles of this band.

In addition to the most popular track “Відьми” (Witches), the band usually has other cool tracks, such as “Omana” (Омана) or “Dancing on bones” (Tанці на кістках). The musicians post all the announcements on their social networks, Tik-Tok and Instagram. So, recently there was a small “boom” from the band BALKON when they published information about a new song. There are even local jokes about this, saying that every year the musicians simply translate “Witches” and get into the information space.

However, this time, the band used it to their advantage and turned it into a great PR move. They published several videos with a piece of this song, only in English, and announced the release of a new track. Of course, the band received a lot of hate, such as “One-song band” and “They won’t come up with anything new,” but a lot of fans supported BALKON and were sincerely waiting for the appearance of a new version of their favorite song. The day before the release, the band announced that there would be no English version of “Witches” and it would remain just a fragment on social media. However, the day after, they announced another song. Waiting for the main date, the musicians surprised their fans with the release of not only a brand-new track “Eclipsed” (Затьмарені), but also their first video for this song, which gained almost 1.5 thousand views in 10 days.

BALKON has repeatedly attracted the attention of the Ukrainian media. For example, LIGA.net recently wrote about their latest single “Eclipsed”, which reveals the struggle with psycho-emotional states through authentic lyrics and dark horror electronics. They were also recognized by Varianty as a band that is gradually achieving important achievements in their music.