Vøvk 20.03.2026

Ukrainian trio VØVK move between post-hardcore and progressive rock on Litera, a 2025 album that turns struggle, loss, hope and renewal into an emotional landscape of animals, fire, water and earth. In interview guitarist Yehor Druzenko tells more.

For Druzenko, the band right now is defined by a sound that stays heavy without locking itself into one lane. He describes VØVK as a blend of post-hardcore and progressive rock, and Litera as a way of speaking about war indirectly, through mood, movement and image rather than plain statement.

The core idea was to tell that story without naming everything head-on. Nature and animal metaphors became the frame, with drought, flood, fire and damaged terrain reflecting the emotional reality of people living through upheaval.

He says the long process around the record changed even more once the current trio came together. VØVK’s lineup with Druzenko and drummer Yevhenii Khrulov locked in during January 2022, just before the invasion, and that timing left the album’s final shape inseparable from wartime experience.

That also helps explain the distance between their 2019 album Lair and Litera. Druzenko hears the debut as a broader search through several ideas, while the new record feels more focused, more cohesive and clearer about the band’s own center.

In practical terms, the trio work in a direct, almost architectural way. Oleksandr Kuts brought in a large part of the material, Druzenko reshaped guitar parts so they could function through a single player, and Khrulov rebuilt much of the drumming around his own approach, which gave the album some of its biggest changes from the earlier band.

A major decision came with language. An early sign of that process can be heard around the bilingual Tiger | Tyhr single, but Druzenko says the band eventually understood that Litera had to stay in Ukrainian if it was going to carry the record’s emotional weight honestly and fully.

That choice also sharpened the album’s message. Druzenko reduces it almost bluntly: war is bad. But what interests the band more is how war actually feels from inside, in fragments, mood swings and altered perspectives that do not fit the cleaner narratives people absorb from a distance.

Several songs make those ideas concrete. Leleka ties memory, flooding and displacement to the history of the Kakhovka hydroelectric project, while Mur turns the image of walls and corridors into a portrait of nights spent waiting for morning to arrive like something almost imaginary.

The guests are used with similar care. Litera brings in spoken word from Maksym Chukhlib, Johannes Persson on Promin, and Anton Slepakov on the closing Okean, where the record’s metaphorical language gives way to something more direct. The band also note that Persson’s appearance marked the first time in his career he sang in Ukrainian.

The circumstances around the album never disappeared from the process. The band have described studio work being broken up by air raids and power outages, which matches Druzenko’s picture of a record made through repeated interruption and return.

Looking ahead, the band are beginning to turn toward new material, but not in a rush. For now there is still Litera to carry forward, including its smoky blue vinyl edition, while VØVK are also listed among the artists for Faine Misto festival.

Vøvk interview from 2023: https://anti-commercial.media/vovk-04-2023/