It’s a unique achievement for a band singing in Russian to become so successful in the West, let alone attain Spotify success through TikTok videos and surreal memes of dancing children, but Molchat Doma have managed it. The Minsk-based trio have struck an effective formula. Listening to their music feels like the poetic downer you get when it’s 3am on a night out: it’s all good fun now, but it’s bound to be over soon. Constant comparisons to New Order, The Cure and Depeche Mode may seem lazy, but they help a great ideal in explaining Molchat Doma’s surface appeal in areas dominated by English-language music. Egor Shkutko’s intense lamentations of monotony, oppression and loneliness are partly concealed by the language barrier and wrapped in comfortingly danceable synthpop. It’s just different enough to seem new.

But those hooked enough to translate the band’s lyrics are refreshed by their unabashed emotional intensity. Viral hit Sudno (Boris Ryzhy) from the band’s popular 2018 album Etazhi concerns a suicidal narrator at the end of his tether. From the same album, Toska deals with the self-destructive processes which keep us trapped in wallowing: ‘Why does it feel so good, melancholy?’ The poetic influences named by Molchat Doma in various interviews feed into this. Boris Ryzhy documented the dead end of post-Soviet Russia in the 90s before taking his own life at the age of 25 after struggling with alcoholism. Romantic communist Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, his revolutionary fervour deflated and submerged by Stalinist repression. Joseph Brodsky was ripped from his lover and child and deported from the USSR in the 1970s after a decade of persecution.

It’s the band’s unapologetic anguish which piqued the interest of the loose online ‘doomer’ subculture, made up of alienated young people who feel resigned to a future of economic hardship and environmental decay. Molchat Doma’s music often features in ‘Russian doomer music’ playlists on YouTube. There is more happening here than self-indulgent wallowing. In a time where many young people feel disempowered and unable to improve their circumstances, being open with your pessimism can feel empowering and even at peace. But this links up with a tendency by some fans of the band to romanticise the ex-Soviet states as ‘void’ wonderlands where everyone openly revels in hopelessness. Molchat Doma itself are annoyed by this attitude, with the group stating in one Reddit interview: ‘Those who do this simply did not find themselves in our realities. I doubt that after one year of living here, they would continue to do this.’

Especially on TikTok, young fans even romanticise the USSR itself through their music, interpreting the band’s 80s influences and use of the brutalist Hotel Panorama in Slovakia on the cover of Etazhi as some kind of nostalgia for Soviet times. The band’s decision to use the North Korean Worker’s Party Monument on the cover of Monument makes this perception seem even more ridiculous by stretching love for Brutalism to its extremes. It’s very unlikely Molchat Doma are followers of Juche. In fact, their lyrics are directly critical of post-Soviet realities such as poor housing, oligarchs, and the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in the group’s native Belarus.

But it’s worth considering why these young people feel a pull towards the USSR and how this squares with their interest in Molchat Doma. Part of it is simple rebelliousness. Especially in the US, socialism and communism have been used so liberally as pejorative terms that all the sting has been taken out of them. Russophobia is rife in most Western political parties, and often combined with anti-communism, as if the USSR still exists. This can also be chalked up to ill-informed escapism. 2020 marked a profound crisis for most Western capitalist states, especially the USA and UK. With whole industries devastated, economic prospects for young people in the West are not promising. Yet no visible alternative to our current system is present, so some young people look back to when one appeared to exist.

But for all the East-West miscommunication, there is something universal in Molchat Doma’s music. Though many of their songs deal with the former USSR, many of their complaints resonate with what’s happening in Western Europe and North America too. In Volny, Shkutko sings: ‘Through the absurdity of everyday life, social problems/Save it for you in hundreds of files.’ These lines could be about any dehumanising bureaucracy, from Universal Credit in the UK to ICE in America. In the UK, we like to think of ourselves as naturally immune to many of the political problems which plague other countries. The words ‘corruption’ and ‘oligarchy’ are almost exclusively used to describe post-Soviet states, yet when we have a government using the pandemic to award lucrative contracts to Conservative party donors, it’s labelled ‘chumocracy’.

Despite their eighties influences, Molchat Doma sums up our shared modern problems simply with its translated name: ‘Houses Are Silent’. It’s decaying khrushchoby and ‘quick-fix’ office-to-home conversions. It’s empty holiday homes and Airbnbs. It’s the hidden shame of poverty that comes with your first visit to a food bank. If anything, it’s silence which causes and exacerbates suffering. Perhaps that’s what makes Sudno and other songs like it so cathartic.