Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist punk rock band that constantly pushes back against its government, has released a new single in English titled “I Can’t Breathe,” inspired by Eric Garner, The Guardian reports.
According to the report, the song is the first one from the group performed in English. Its members, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, have dedicated it to all of those “who can’t breathe.”
It is a dark piece, with both performers dressed in Russia’s riot-police uniforms and slowly being buried alive.
The Guardian notes that the Pussy Riot members wrote the song after they took part in protests over Garner’s death after an encounter with police in Staten Island, N.Y. They dedicated it to the fallen father of six and “all who suffer from state terror—killed, choked, perished because of war and police violence—to political prisoners and those on the streets fighting for change.”
According to The Guardian, the group also declared that the song was a protest against the politics of Russia and President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“The genre of this isn’t like other Pussy Riot songs. It’s an industrial ballad. Dark and urban. The rhythm and beat of the song is a metaphor of the heartbeat, the beat of a heart before it’s about to stop. The absence of our usual aggressive punk vocals in this song is a reaction to this tragedy,” Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina wrote in a piece published by the news site.
“Since last spring we have been living in a condition of war and hatred towards the rest of the world that the Kremlin called the ‘Russian Spring’ … a bloody war in Ukraine, fuelled and controlled by Russia, a civilian plane that was shot down by a rocket that killed hundreds of people from around the world—a lot of our plans and artistic conceptions were changed by news from the war zone that was arriving daily,” they added.
“We really could not breathe for this whole last year,” they continued. “Our previous ideas did not speak to what was happening in the conflict zone in Ukraine as we were realizing that Russia is burying itself alive in terms of the rest of the world. Committing suicide. Daily. And so the song I Can’t Breathe is about us and our country as well. It is about Russia, too.”
Read more at The Guardian.