“Who even cares?”: SYNOPÓL drops “Порив”, a track about the thing that costs people their chance to be happy

SYNOPÓL has released the single Порив — Ukrainian for a sudden rush of impulse — easy electronica with a dance beat that hides a conversation about the fear of getting things wrong. The track came out on 31 August on every platform.

The artist announced it herself on Instagram.

Olia Synopol records as SYNOPÓL, and this is her second release in a row leaning towards electronica: in the spring she put out Сяєм, and Порив carries the same line forward. Both came out on the Kyiv indie label PLAN.

What she is singing about

The story is simple and easy to recognise: the moment a person stops glancing over their shoulder at what everyone else thinks. The artist says it without a single metaphor — and her own wording explains the title better than any description could.

“People are often afraid of making mistakes, and because of that fear they lose the most precious thing there is — being happy and at peace with themselves. For some reason everyone thinks far too much about what somebody else will think of them, and… who even cares? Life is not as long as it seems to us, so make mistakes, do what you love, and feel that rush inside you!” — SYNOPÓL wrote.

The same day the artist put up a lyric video: over the blurred portrait from the cover, lines light up one after another — “у машині двоє”, “темнуватих діб”, “хай ця ніч”. The track runs three minutes and forty-seven seconds.

Almost the whole team behind the release is from Lviv: Dmytro Hurzhii handled the sound, photographer Veronika Sheredko shot the portrait for the cover, and the make-up came from the Solia Beauty studio. PLAN, the label the single came out on, describes itself as multi-genre indie and is based in Kyiv.

Why a release like this is worth noticing

Ukrainian electronica of the past few years has been growing not out of big labels but out of exactly this kind of small team: an artist, a sound engineer, a photographer — and a record made with no television and no rotation budget behind it.

Streaming catalogues, incidentally, filed Порив under pop — yet both SYNOPÓL and the label insist on electronica. This is one of those cases where a platform’s genre tag lags behind what actually comes through the headphones.

Earlier we wrote about how Ukrainian electronica travelled from squats to Coachella.