Photo by Lina Glasir
Metal has a great deal in common with pop – I’d say it’s the flipside of the same coin: the anti-pop. Where pop is meant to appeal, metal intentionally repels. Metal is discordant by design where pop seeks out the melodic and harmonious – but both styles balance the expected and the unexpected. Both rely on groove, seeking to generate that visceral compulsion to move our bodies. Metal remains one of the freshest genres of music today, drawing in influences from other styles and constantly evolving and exploring new sub-genres.
Jinjer’s vocalist Tatiana Shmayluk, embodies this flip side – she’s No Doubt-era GwenStefani x The Exorcist, bossing the stage, flamboyant and engaging, hitting clean highs with pure tone (and has even been in punk and ska bands) but she’s so much more – boasting one of metal’s most hardcore screams and a deep, three octave range bringing to life her darkly compelling lyrics.
Shmayluk hates Jinjer being referred to as a “female-fronted band” and cites Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe as an early vocal idol as well as Otep Shamaya (OTEP). Her screaming style is full-bore, with great timbre and huge depth and loses absolutely nothing live. She has said ‘sometimes you can tell that it’s a woman screaming, and I didn’t want to hear that about myself’ and she has absolutely achieved her goal, with many commenters thinking Jinjer had two vocalists.
Jinjer have been on a characteristically busy world tour schedule since releasing their fifth studio album Duél in February 2025, completing 70 shows, with onward dates in Birmingham, London, Europe and the Americas. Their energy remains undimmed and their live performance is as relentless as their tour schedule.
Tonight’s set mixes new and old – opening with Duél, Green Serpent and Fast Draw from the new album, all backed by some great visuals – varying from cartoony and almost Danny-Elfman-esque, through more traditionally “metal” bullets-and-guns, a firestorm cityscape (Vortex), blood red church-inspired images (Tantrum), and a hard-wired, networked classroom more reminiscent of a sweatshop (Teacher, Teacher!).
Where Shmayluk brings most of the physical energy in the stage performance, drummer Vladislav Ulasevich looks impossibly laid back considering the lines he is putting down, particularly on Tantrum. Guitarist Roman Ibramkhalilov and bass player Eugene Abdukhanov are understated too, letting their instruments do the talking, deploying a wild range of techniques in an un-flashy but hugely effective way.
Kafka showcases Jinjer’s mastery and diversity of pace and tempo, utilising everything from slow and sludgy, doom, pacey buildups, head-banging riffs and full-on hardcore.
The drumming on I Speak Astronomy is insanely technical – it’s crazy to be able to play a song like this live at all, let alone in the middle of such a demanding set – and for a brief moment Ulasevich seems like just a human playing a drum kit. There is no let up, hardly any break between songs and minimal chit-chat; it is suffocatingly heavy, irresistibly compelling, and brutally executed.
Jinjer have consistently built up a reputation and a catalogue that really puts them up there with my favourite current metal bands. It has a really broad appeal (for metalcore), which is reflected in the diversity of tonight’s audience, in age, style and gender-balance – something Jinjer are very proud of.
Shmayluk sarcastically introduces their biggest hit, Pisces, as “one you haven’t heard before” – perhaps a playful expression of the frustration she feels with playing old material “[I get] so tired of performing all the old stuff. After you’ve practised the songs and recorded, it already feels so old.” – well, if that is the case, it absolutely doesn’t show. The whole band is fully invested from start to finish and putting everything into their performance.
Perhaps another quote sums up why a band with such intense music can still put so much into it night after night: ‘I don’t mean that metal is negative … It’s just like you have very intense feelings that you have to let go somehow… then you’re back to normal life’.
I've been playing bass guitar and guitar for over half my life. I last played bass in in a band called Electromotive and as a singer-songwriter I have written songs about cheese and vajazzles (separate songs!). I started out listening to 60s, 70s and 80s rock as a kid and I was in to grunge and U.S. punk and ska in the 90s. Since then, I've broadened my tastes and I like the best of all styles of music, even country. I've been writing for Silent Radio since it started.
