Natalia Smirina, the vocalist of the Kharkiv-based indie-pop band Pur:Pur, sits down on a bench in Taras Shevchenko Park in Kyiv, takes off her sunglasses and quickly touches up her makeup. Smirina says she often draws a white line under her eyebrows to highlight her eyes. Her look is indeed striking.
Smirina is in a rush, as she has several interviews and meetings planned before her departure in the evening to Kherson — the next stop on her band’s nationwide tour of Ukraine. And fame has also come in a rush for Smirina. Pur:Pur has been going for eight years, but the band only recently caught the public’s eye after making it to the semi-final on Feb. 13 of the national selection competition for Ukraine’s entry to this year’s Eurovision song contest.
Smirina’s unusual voice, exotic outfits and quirky eye makeup, which in combination make her vaguely reminiscent of the famous Icelandic singer Bjork, are obviously part of Pur:Pur’s appeal, and exposure on national television has boosted attendance at the band’s concerts in recent months. But the path to fame hasn’t been easy.
Pur: Pur singer Natalia Smirina. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Pur:Pur was founded in 2008 after Smirina, who was studying to be a pharmacist, met guitarist Eugene Zhebko, who was a TV director. They soon recorded their first song, entitled “Cosmic Girl,” and uploaded it to YouTube.
The band survived a crisis in 2012, when three of its five members left. Only Pur:Pur’s backbone, Smirina and Zhebko, remained. They recruited a replacement drummer, Hrihoriy Oliynyk, and revamped their sound as a three-piece, doing away with the bass guitar altogether and opting for keyboard bass.
The band now distributes their songs online and promotes them on social networks. So far, Pur:Pur has four albums and two singles available online at purpurmusic.com. The band has more than 146,000 followers on social network Vkontakte, the Russian analog of Facebook.
However, the band has no producer, and Smirina says that it’s hard for a young Ukrainian band with an unusual style to find one. She says that most producers simply want to make money out of performances, rather than investing in developing groups that have a unique style.
As a result, Ukrainian television and radio broadcast a lot of bland and simple songs, she says.
“Ukraine has perverted the concept of quality pop music, but now the situation is getting better,” Smirina says.
She says that the younger generation, which has been raised on quality western pop music, is simply not interested in a low-quality product any more.
“People are tired of plastic,” she says. “They’re looking for quality.”
Smirina, who writes the lyrics for the band’s songs, says she mostly writes about love or about the internal monologue in a person’s mind. The band’s latest hit “We Do Change,” tells a story of a person who tries to improve, but encounters a lot of failure along the way. Smirina says she tries to include a moral to the story she tells in each song.
But as well as gaining success, the band has been criticized for performing in Russia after the Ukrainian territory of Crimea was annexed by the Kremlin, and Moscow fomented war in eastern Ukraine.
Smirina says that the band carried on performing in Russia so as to explain to the people coming to their concerts what is really going on in Ukraine, and to expose the lies of Russian propaganda. She says the band is for peace and wants to build a dialog with people in Russia.
However, she also says she writes apolitical songs for global citizens, no matter which country they are from.
“Our goal is to make people leave our concerts with a kindly smile on their faces and in a good mood,” Smirina says.
Smirina, who was an intern in a hospital for a month when she was a student, compares writing songs to treating patients. But she says she “helps to treat souls” rather than bodies.
“When people come up to you after a concert and say that your song helped them to understand something important or to get through a hard moment in their life, you understand that your work matters.”
