“gain”

veiila are the singer vif nüte and bes eirid, a duo formed in Saint Petersburg in 2014. Their press notes describe them as Russian dissidents who, when Russia invaded Ukraine, packed their lives into a couple of suitcases rather than support the war, and who have called themselves since, after Kurt Vonnegut, “a band without a country”. MusicBrainz now lists them in Armenia. Their debut album, The Nation of One, came out in January 2020 on Wormhole World Records, and the second, Sentimental Craving for Beauty, in September 2023, framed by the band as downtempo music hiding a Schopenhauerian pessimism.

“gain” came out on 3 November, with a lyric video on the band’s channel, as the first single from a third studio album due in January 2027. By the band’s account, it opens on an ominous acoustic piano and then swings between minor and major keys, with rock-anthem choruses and operatic bridges. They call it the clearest example of where their sound has gone: rougher rhythms, a brooding piano, neo-classical leanings and sound design that recalls 1990s electronica, a long way from the chill-out of their earlier records. The lyric counts broken dreams and keeps asking whether all this is a test or a game, and whether the singer alone is to blame, until the repeated “again” of the chorus wears down to the title.

It is a well-produced song and a dark one, and vif nüte’s voice is lovely and harrowing at once. Put on headphones for it: the mix is full of spatial sounds.