Russian band Shortparis releases ‘Iliada,’ its first album since the death of singer Nikolai Komyagin

On October 9, Shortparis released “Iliada” (“Iliad”), their first album since vocalist Nikolai Komyagin died in February 2026. Its sound is unusual for the band, and its lyrics are probably the most candid in their catalog. Music critic Artyom Makarsky explores how “Iliada” differs from the band’s earlier recordings and how some of its lyrics might be interpreted.

There aren’t many Russian-language posthumous albums. Records by Andy Cartwright and Yung Trappa came out almost immediately after their deaths — both musicians left plenty of finished, unreleased material. In rock, collaborators usually spent a long time finishing the musicians’ work, and most of these recordings revealed a different side of the artist: Kino’s “Cherny albom” (“Black Album,” 1991) drew on house and electronic music, while Yanka’s “Styd i sram” (“Shame and Disgrace,” 1991), completed by Yegor Letov, was more jittery and tense than her other work. There was also Sergei Kuryokhin’s “Detsky albom” (“Children’s Album,” 1998), on which he sang for the first time and ventured into dance music.

Shortparis also change their style on “Iliada.” Acoustic keyboards increasingly replace synthesizers, with horns appearing here and there as the band moves toward epic rock. In 2018, their cover of the glam rock song “All the Young Dudes,” written by David Bowie, was an anomaly in their catalog. After “Iliada,” that experiment seems like a logical step — Shortparis are now releasing music in the vein of early Sparks, Bowie himself, or the unfairly overlooked Soviet art rock band Aprelsky Marsh. Only “Gvozd” (“Nail”) and “Zanovo” (“All Over Again”), with rhythms more typical of the band, recall the old Shortparis.

Still, this change will really surprise only those who missed everything the band has released since keyboardist Alexander Galyanov left in 2023. The tenderness of “Kolybelnaya” (“Lullaby”) and “Proshchalnaya” (“Farewell Song”) has its roots in their soundtrack to Anna Melikyan’s film “Chuvstva Anny” (“Anna’s Feelings”). Straightforward rock was already there on the EP “Grozdya gneva” (“Grapes of Wrath,” 2023), and horns appeared on “Rodnaya zemlya” (“Native Land”), a song from Kirill Serebrennikov’s film “Ballada ob Edichke” (“Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie”).

The band released nothing in 2024 — perhaps they had probably already begun work on ‘Iliada’ by then. They seem to have devoted the past two years to the project, with a pause after Komyagin’s sudden death in February 2026. That summer, the magazine Pravila Zhizni tried to get drummer Danila Kholodkov to open up about what would happen next, but he said only that “right now, nobody’s even trying to think about [new releases].” Still, the band released an album: “Iliada” became their final statement, a monument to Komyagin, and a way to work through their grief.

“Iliada” has three main lyrical themes: death (and, with it, war), silence, and doubt.

Death appears in the opening song’s very first line: “The dead will no longer fall into line.” The theme develops in “Poy so mnoy” (“Sing With Me”), which describes two scenes: birch trees stained with soldiers’ blood and advertisements featuring dead soldiers in the subway. And though fireworks go off — perhaps for Victory Day? — nothing lets you forget death.

Yet the world of “Iliada” is largely closed off: everything that happens to the album’s narrator takes place in Russia. The soldiers have already returned — they lie buried in their native soil. “Russkaya toska, ili Pesnya slabaka” (“Russian Melancholy, or a Weakling’s Song”) recreates a storyline from Alexei Balabanov’s film “Gruz 200” (“Cargo 200”). Another coffin arrives in “Pobeda” (“Victory: Song for a Children’s Funeral Orchestra”) — this time carrying a father rather than a fiancé — as jubilant propaganda contrasts with a sense of catastrophe. Here, too, Ukraine is evoked through allegory: “There the banks are jelly, there the sand is sugar, but the river flows not with water, but with bitter boiling water.” This place promises a soldier certain death.

Silence is the album’s second major theme. The protagonist keeps recalling how he said and did nothing: “I’ll be peaceful, I’ll be meek, I’ll be faithful, a galley slave”; “Do you remember the tear rolling from your eyes when you kept quiet for the first time?”; “Hear that growling? That’s our silence”; and “In the silence, whispers about the country.” He’s hardly happy about it. He’s forever questioning himself (the record’s third main theme): “Maybe these songs aren’t sung in vain?”; “What if I’ve been singing about all the wrong things? What if we’ve all been going the wrong way?” In the line “I’d sing only of love, but the country doesn’t want that,” Komyagin, who often sang of a coarse, gritty romanticism, suddenly realizes he needs to speak about something else after all. Now he’s gone, and these lines full of doubt have become darker still.

Shortparis never wanted to state their position clearly and directly, and Komyagin’s own interviews left the same impression. But war demands an answer. Komyagin understood that, and so “Iliada” became the band’s clearest album. Its lyrics are still full of contradictions, as in the closing lines of “Zanovo”: “All-o-ver-a-gain! You can’t start again! Start again! Everything all over again!” Or take “Molodost” (“Youth”), a song that touches on a possible revolution while telling the story of someone unprepared for it. But the album depicts such a bleak world that the band’s overall position is clear. Komyagin does, however, seem to mourn the Russian soldiers, asking in “Kolybelnaya”: “Who will remember all their faces? Could even you, Lord?” Not every listener will necessarily share that sentiment.

The band’s aptly named label, Fenix Music, stresses that the album should be heard in full, and its cohesion really does matter. But another contradiction emerges here: “Iliada” is clearly an unfinished album, as the titles of some tracks suggest — “Pervaya” (“First”), “Shestaya” (“Sixth”), and “Sedmaya” (“Seventh”). On “Pervaya,” the words are unintelligible, sounding more like a scratch vocal laid over the music for lack of finished lyrics. The two interludes are much the same, with the nonsense words on “Interlyudiya I” (“Interlude I”) clearly following the rhythm of the lyrics to “Poy so mnoy.” “Shestaya” ends the same way.

This unfinished quality seems to be the greatest strength of “Iliada.” Shortparis’ music used to be polished, perfect in many respects — even the noise was deliberate. Now that close listening reveals missing (or very quiet) syllables in Komyagin’s singing, the band’s songs come alive, feel more intimate, and become easier to understand.

Shortparis like to quote literary classics when talking about themselves. In 2025, for instance, they accompanied the news of their return from a European tour with a photograph of a page from Andrei Platonov’s “Chevengur.” It contained a passage about sparrows that don’t fly off to distant lands because they are proletarian birds. A fairly transparent metaphor. The epigraph to “Iliada” uses the same technique, quoting Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s “Chto delat?” (“What Is to Be Done?”):

This reference is more complicated than it seems. The song in the passage is sung by Vera Pavlovna, the protagonist of “Chto delat?” Shortly after this scene, she learns that her husband has killed himself. The song is the French revolutionary song “Ça ira,” written by a former soldier and also known in Russian as “Akh, poydut dela na lad” (“Ah, Things Will Get Better”). Chernyshevsky freely translated this iconic song, which predated “La Marseillaise,” as follows:

That “we’ll live to see it” now feels especially bitter, while “Akh, poydut dela na lad” itself seems to hold the key to the record: despite all the contradictions, there is hope. This text mattered to Komyagin — back in 2023, he read it onstage, putting particular emphasis on “We’ll live on, we’ll live to see it.” And Homer’s “Iliad,” after all, tells of the final days of a 10-year war.