Vidrada by Obiymy Doschu is, for me, the album of 2025. Oh yes: it’s ‘only’ May and I’m going there. And this review would have appeared a lot earlier if only I could have found the words to tell you why.
The truth is, everything I wish to say feels hopelessly inadequate. But perhaps the sense of inadequacy is precisely the point – how do you describe the feeling of arriving somewhere you’ve never been yet somehow recognise? Vidrada doesn’t invite you to visit its world; it reveals a place you’ve always been but have somehow totally forgotten amidst the highs and lows of everyday life. It reminds you of something that’s always been there, something you’ve always known. Quite simply, it feels like coming home.
There are songs on this album which will make you cry with the exaltation of hope, and there are songs which will make you sob with the despair of sorrow. We are not talking about ‘home’ as a place of comfort. We are talking about ‘home’ as a place of recognition – a place where all your experiences belong, together, including the unsettling, the disquieting and the painful. Home is a place where our contradictions coexist.
Across the eight tracks on this remarkable album, soaring melodies carry the happiness of childhood alongside the fear and savagery of war. The swirling turbulence of our daily experiences blends and weaves with the safety and comfort of our memories. Vidrada means “joy, refuge, solace”. But what we need to remember is that these three words do not point to three separate states. Instead, they suggest a single, profoundly complex feeling of sanctuary where darkness and light intermingle, and where the boundaries are ill-defined, blurry and uncertain.
Seven years in the making and forged amid the brutal realities of war in Ukraine, this album brilliantly shows us how the contradictions of life in this world can be transformed into art. Volodymyr Agafonkin’s exceptional vision and creativity breathlessly illustrates that the most profound music emerges not from safety but from the necessity of having to find joy within existential struggle, needing to discover refuge within tumultuous chaos, and clinging to solace within profound uncertainty.
Listen closely; you’ll hear exactly how Vidrada creates this emotional landscape. Look at the cover art before beginning with the opening track Children (Track 1). Innocent curiosity, the world as wonder, nature as our playground. There is an inherent urge to play, to climb trees, to run with the wind. Somewhere along the way, the wonder dulls, and the time for play disappears. We stop climbing trees.
Welcome home. You never left. It’s always been there. Tap into the beauty of the spirit of being alive.
At Distance (Track 2), transports us to the present.
The bond with our home – earth, nature – is lost. Our spirit becomes subdued, we crave for connection, but
After The War (Track 5) is heartbreaking. What makes it so devastating is the extraordinary focus on small, mundane details.
And then the punch hits us: “And post on social media / That I’m alive.” The ordinary, the day-to-day, continues amidst the extraordinary, the chaos of war. But there is hope even here.
What does hope look like? Exactly the same as lament. It’s all in the details.
The extraordinary emerges because of the ordinary. It is always there in the small things, the details which make up a life. We just forget to see it or fail to recognise it when overwhelmed by the maelstrom of life.
This is very much the message of the final track Don’t Give Up (Track 8). It is no easy listen and perfectly encapsulates everything we’ve been saying about our rugged ability to hold contradictions and find sanctuary within struggle. There is no false comfort here. It acknowledges real darkness and stares it directly in the face, eye-to-eye. Friends have disappeared:
The unbearable feeling of being “trapped underwater / A steel tank around you,” lying awake unable to sleep,
But then we find glimmers of hope in the smallest things:
Hope and lament look the same; the change comes when we pay attention to the small things of life. This is how the extraordinary emerges from the ordinary. In the end, “Who has never known loss / Will never understand joy” is particularly powerful and incredibly poignant. Our emotional complexity, as we experience it through the album, isn’t accidental but necessary. You can’t have genuine sanctuary without acknowledging and accepting exactly what you need sanctuary from.
Until you reach that point, the possibility of progression from “sharing a school desk” to “watching your grandchildren grow” is impossible. What Agafonkin has given us is priceless. Across the entirety of our lives, the need, the desire to “start again” isn’t a one-off moment built on crisis but actually something which is a lifelong practice underpinning the very meaning of our lives. Don’t Give Up is, in reality, an instruction manual – it tells you how to live with the contradictions which make us who we are.
A lot of albums invite you on a journey where the path is carefully prepared and the tracks signpost you toward a particular, fixed destination. Vidrada does something far more mysterious and intensely beautiful: it creates a space where joy and poignancy, hope and loss can coexist without resolution, without explanation, just as they do in the messy fullness of all our lives. It is what it means to be human. This is music to which you don’t simply listen. Hearing it doesn’t simply ‘move’ you. Vidrada stops you in your tracks, brings you home and reminds you of what it feels like to be completely, contradictorily alive.
TRACK LISTING
01. Діти / Children (7:01)
02. На відстані / At Distance (5:08)
03. Буревій / Hurricane (5:34)
04. Відрада / Refuge (6:26)
05. Після війни / After The War (4:44)
06. Час / Time (5:29)
07. Істини / Truths (8:57)
08. Не опускати руки / Don’t Give Up (6:16)
Total Time – 49:35
MUSICIANS
Volodymyr Agafonkin — Vocals, Acoustic Guitar, Music (1, 3–8), Lyrics
Yevhenii Dubovyk — Piano, Keyboards
Yaroslav Gladilin — Drums
Mykola Kryvonos — Bass Guitar, Production
Olena Nesterovska — Viola, Music (2)
Oleksii Perevodchyk — Electric Guitars
~ With:
Oleksiy Katruk — Contributions to Guitar Parts
Kateryna Nesterovska — Violin I
Anastasiia Shypak — Violin II
Karina Sokolovska — Back Vocals
Andriy Tkachenko — Extreme Vocals (7)
Artem Zamkov — Cello
Mariia Zhytnikova — Back Vocals (1 & 4)
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Independent
Country of Origin: Ukraine
Date of Release: 30th May 2025
LINKS
Obiymy Doschu – Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | YouTube | X | Instagram
