At Latexfauna’s very first gig in Kyiv, the audience already knew their lyrics by heart.
It was 2016, about a year after the four guys started composing vivid and groovy ballads. Done with a husky voice, guitar, bass and synthesizer and in a room too small to fit a drum kit. So they used a drum machine — like a true indie pop band.
“Imagine that, the first show and everyone is singing along! We were impressed,” says Illya Sluchanko. He was at that show in Kyiv’s Mezzanine club and later joined the band as a new guitarist.
Beside him stood Max Greben, who was also inspired to join as a drummer. Luckily, he had an electronic drum pad that didn’t take up much space.
“I had never heard something like this in Ukraine and in Ukrainian. I was hooked,” he told the Kyiv Post.
Subsequently, Latexfauna released an album with Ukraine’s leading Moon Records alternative label and, before COVID‑19 hit, toured all over the country. This summer, the Kyiv-based band was back on the road with shows every week.
But most importantly, Latexfauna has a solid fanbase that few groups in the country can match: people sing along at every show, quote the lyrics in conversations and social media, and even tattoo or engrave them on wedding rings.
“We wanted to be a band whose tracks are like family members, a big part of people’s lives,” Dima Zezyulin, the frontman and songwriter, says. “And we really are that band now.”
Tribe
Another key person at that fateful show was Bohdan Utsekha, who would become Latexfauna’s managing director. A promoter who supervised shows for Ukraine’s iconic Ocean Elzy and TNMK in the 2000s, he transformed Latexfauna from indie nobodies to a thriving touring band.
He started with things as trivial as cool new sneakers for the stage.
“Back then, we looked like suckers, you know. So he got us all New Balance sneakers at a 50% discount!” Zezyulin remembers. “Basically, he started the band’s economics.”
“Without him, we didn’t realize how much we were worth. We asked for ridiculous fees, like Hr 1,500 ($55) a show,” says Les Dyman, who plays bass.
The band’s members say that Utsekha saw Latexfauna as “the band of his life.” And it became his legacy after he died in 2018 at just 44 after passing the management to his friend Borys Ginzhuk.
“Utsekha was our shaman,” says Sasha Mylnikov, who plays the keyboards.
For Mylnikov the band is a tribe and it’s a recurring theme in Latexfauna’s music. “Ajahuaska,” their first song ever with a mellow chillwave feel, is a trippy tale of a native tribe fighting the invading “cowboys.” Their authenticity helps the tribe prevail.
Latexfauna is that tribe in Ukrainian music. While not an indie band in the sense of being self-published, they view themselves as “stand-alone” in relation to Ukraine’s music industry. They don’t frequent any of its parties, awards and album presentations, preferring their rehearsal room.
But the industry wants a piece of Latexfauna. They did a joint single with the popular Alina Pash, Sergey Babkin and others in support of LGBTQ rights in 2020. And most recently, Ukraine’s pop diva Tina Karol invited them to sing their sexy tune “Bounty” together on her new record featuring the young blood of the Ukrainian music scene.
Latexfauna also doesn’t have time for the glitz and glam of the industry because most members still have day jobs. The five guys in their thirties have long been planning to quit their offices to live off their music, but “natural greed” for extra profit still prevails, says Zezyulin.
Except for bass player Dyman, who was the first to quit his day job.
“Latexfauna is my job,” he says. “It’s my life’s color.”
Coloring lives
Dyman says he realized the extent of Latexfauna’s success when he saw how other people add color to their lives with their music: as a soundtrack to photos and videos from their journeys, vacations and dance parties. The band’s Instagram reposts such content daily.
Latexfauna may also be one of the most quotable Ukrainian bands. Their lyrical hooks have become memes, spotted everywhere: social media, clothes, street art and tattoos.
Their charm often comes from an unexpected source — surzhyk, a mix of Ukrainian and Russian spoken in provinces. Although surzhyk figures in only a few of Latexfauna’s songs, language purists like to rebuke the band.
But Zezyulin says he uses it naturally, as a way to add texture and sincerity. When in a song called “Lime” his character says “I’m fine with you” in surzhyk, he’s not pretending to be someone more cultured. He’s vulnerable and the phrase might be somewhat closer in meaning to a real “I love you.”
“It brings more sincerity than any artsy swagger,” Zezyulin says. So people have engraved that very phrase on their wedding rings, he adds.
Latexfauna’s music also resonates sexual energy through hints, some subtle and some less so, like the band’s name itself. But this sexuality is never blatant as in much of pop music. Instead, people in Zezyulin’s lyrics simply “open up,” “throw their hair back” and “like” each other a lot.
The men in Latexfauna’s songs are also sexy and confident, which is unusual for Ukrainian music, where they mostly cry and suffer for their love. But this oomph is subtle: Zezyulin’s male characters are simply “being kissed first,” or “have many, but love just one.”
“You’re not saying ‘I’m a sexy male, love me!’ You’re simply describing a situation in which a man is seen as cool and sexy,” Zezyulin says.
Latexfauna also does not shy away from singing about psychedelic drugs. The title track on their debut album “Ajahuaska” refers to a psychoactive plant, and a hook to a song called “Delfinam” vocalizes “MDMA,” a drug better known as ecstasy. It’s no surprise that some critics call them “junkies.”
But Zezyulin talks publicly about the therapeutical use of some psychedelics, practices strictly illegal and demonized in Ukraine. This discourse is part of the band’s sincerity, and he hopes it will help “decriminalize things.”
“The less you hide, the more invulnerable you are. So I try not to hide anything,” Zezyulin says.
From left: Latexfauna’s drummer Max Greben, keyboardist Sasha Mylnikov, frontman and songwriter Dima Zezyulin, bassist Les Dyman and guitarist Illya Sluchanko in Kyiv on Sept. 9, 2021. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Punks not dead
Latexfauna is connected to punk music roots through its somewhat misfit themes. And even stylistically, the band likes to think of themselves as representatives of the new wave music, like The Cure, that came out of punk rock in the late 1970s as a more accessible counterpart to post-punk.
“I call it punk because there is a lot of primitivism in our music,” Zezyulin says. “It may be simple and naive, but it’s beautiful when put together.”
Critics often claim that Latexfauna seem to “play the same song over and over,” though sometimes acknowledging that they do it “like virtuosos.” The band strongly disagrees, saying that, like other famous groups it has developed its distinctive sound.
“You hear the sound, the vibe, the pleasant summer bliss — and it seems to sound the same,” Zezyulin says. “But devoted fans know it’s different.”
Latexfauna is currently working on their second album, planning to release it next year. After cancellation because of the COVID‑19 pandemic, they are also hoping for their first international gig in the Netherlands next spring. Their dream is to play in Chicago, Toronto and London.
Other than that, they have no doubts about what their future holds.
“We’ll write new songs and release them,” guitarist Sluchanko says. “We just love music and can’t stop making it.”
Hear and see Latexfauna at the Ulichnaya eda festival. Sept. 18. 6 p. m. Platforma Art Factory (1 Bilomorska St.) Hr 150
