To Speak Only the Truth. The Anti-War Song Collection «Chuzhie» Released

The former leader of one of Russia's most influential punk bands, Dmitry Spirin, continues his musical career as a solo artist in Argentina. His first solo album was called “Hot War”, released after the band broke up in 2024. It was the musician's emotional reaction to the events of 2022. The shock of those events made it impossible to immediately channel his reaction into songs; moreover, Spirin doubted whether he could continue making music at all. But the songs came, the album was released, and then a big tour followed with a full backing band.

Another project was also waiting for its time. Musicians who shared Dmitry Spirin's anti-war views sent him their songs, written under the impression of the same events. In fact, a collection of anti-war songs from 2022–2025 was something that was bound to happen. One way or another, it would have appeared, with or without Spirin, and certainly not just once. However, in Russia, no one would have dared to release it. And when Dmitry Spirin began discussing with the songwriters how best to present their work, it became clear that many were not ready to take the risk of cooperating with a “foreign agent” and putting their names on the album cover. Thus, the idea was born for a cover album where Spirin himself would perform the songs, and many contributors would hide their names behind pseudonyms.

The album was titled “Chuzhie” (“Strangers” or “Aliens”). By “strangers” he meant both “other people's songs” and their authors, who had become “strangers” in their own homeland, and, if you like, the faceless enforcers depicted on the album cover. The inspiration for the cover art was a famous photo of Vladislav Leontyev, drummer of the band StopTime, taken at a police station. The faces of the police are hidden, and in relation to the central figure they are truly “strangers.” The central character on the cover flickers in and out, appearing and disappearing, metaphorically turning all the protest music that inspired Spirin into a kind of ghostly cultural layer.

The song by StopTime closes the album. Its title translates as “The Last Song.” Naoko (Diana Loginova) and her colleagues were major newsmakers at the time of the album's recording, but creatively they were mostly seen as a cover band. And that's despite Naoko already having officially released original songs. Diana Loginova's original songwriting was one of Spirin's discoveries. At the same time, he decided not just to cover “The Last Song,” but to re-arrange it, giving it a more masculine, ballad-like sound. What struck him most was the lyrics. The song and the album “Chuzhie” end with these words: “If there is an end, you can never return to the beginning. Shame me, shoot me, I'm tired. I will survive without a voice, I will survive without hands. To speak only the truth, you don't need sound.“

“The Last Song” is the finale. Before it are nine more tracks, which together form a picture of the “song underground” that has developed in just a few years. In fact, some tracks are already quite familiar to audiences. For example, the song “Spoiler” appeared on the album by its author Alexey Ponomarev, who performs under the pseudonym Joker James. Alexey is a journalist and songwriter, and also a “relocant” (emigrant).

The album “Rodina,” which Joker James released in 2025, is perhaps one of those collections of songs by which future historians will judge the protest in music of this period. But in 2025, Joker James was seen as just one of the “choir of dissenters,” and the album as something worthy of respect, but not of attentive listening from beginning to end. It's great that Dmitry Spirin “highlighted” the song “Spoiler” not only by turning it into a ballad, but also by making (with the help of neural networks) an unbearably realistic music video.

The plot of the video is based on the fate of a Ukrainian family who attended the last Kyiv concert of Tarakany! in the summer of 2021. These are fictional characters, but you worry about them as if they were real. The action in the video unfolds in reverse order, from the death of all the characters back to the concert. The creators of the video aimed for documentary precision. Nowadays, the use of AI in music videos is often criticized—directors tend to use it in a very formulaic way. However, in the “Spoiler” video, according to Spirin, neural networks are used for a photographically accurate reconstruction of the documentary reality of the current war, from military hardware models to the everyday life of a typical family.

While Dmitry Spirin can freely credit Alexey Ponomaryov as a songwriter and mention him in interviews, for example, the song “Baphomet” is by a St. Petersburg band whose name he does not disclose in the album credits. The band is still active in Russia. Spirin includes them in the same generation of “new” Russian punk bands as Papin Olimpos or, for example, Shokoladny Tort: “When I first heard about them (around 2018–2020), it was youthful pop-punk for high school girls. And honestly, 'Baphomet' was not at all what I expected from them. 'Baphomet,' as far as I know, is the band's only anti-war song; they continue to perform in Russia in various lineups, and their songs haven't been removed from digital platforms.”

By compiling “Chuzhie” from songs with different “geolocations” and varying degrees of openness among their authors, Dmitry Spirin has, it seems, taken on the role of a researcher of contemporary anti-war song, archiving, reflecting on, and reworking the musical material that has come his way. The musician does not hide that not all the tracks sent to him by like-minded artists were worthy of being presented to a wide audience in such a serious and profound project. But it's clear that “Chuzhie” is only the beginning.

Spirin continues to receive new anti-war recordings. Many of them clearly do not meet the strict requirements of today's Russian censorship. Now all that's left is to create a platform or website for them, out of reach of the censors. After releasing “Chuzhie,” it's practically his calling to do so.