Lost in Kyiv – Becoming

Lost in Kyiv sounds like a band you should know. I don’t believe I have ever heard of them before, but a quick Spotify-check post an equally quick Google-search suggested that these Frenchmen had been flying under my radar. A few songs with around a million listens on the aforementioned streaming platform, and four full-length albums under their belt. These guys are established in the European post-rock/post-metal scene, without having reached the level of Cult of Luna, or even a band like Mogwai. Yet. For me and my simple brain, the name popped. That was all. So, I decided to actually check them out, despite “Becoming” only being a single.

Singles can be tricky, but I’m starting to develop a taste for them. And this is not the only single from Lost in Kyiv’s upcoming album We’re all going to be fine, out June 19th, far from it. “Becoming” is in fact the third single, and I’ve therefore decided to go slightly rogue and keep the majority of this review about “Becoming”, whilst also taking the other two singles into account.

Lost in Kyiv are primarily an instrumental band that likes to rely on spoken word voiceovers, if there’s any sort of vocal-involvement at all. That is not the case with “Becoming”, which immediately makes this song extra fascinating to me. It’s a song where the band steps away from what they normally do in order to collaborate with another artist on a single that will be featured on a full album. That’s a tricky task. Rebecca Need-Menear is another unfamiliar name to me, it’s also an embarrassingly difficult name to spell so I’m gonna refer to her as RNM from now on. She makes up the vocal part of the duo i Häxa, and lends her voice to the alternative rock duo Anavae. Now, she becomes the first female vocalist to collaborate with Lost in Kyiv.

“Becoming” starts out with somber, melodic guitar fingering before RNM’s clean, sensitive vocals emerge. A brief flirtation with EDM-style drums is elevated by what I think might be a trumpet. Then the drums take center stage with stuttering, perfectly executed jazz playing. The vocals lead the ensemble not by soaring above, this feels more like hand holding. It’s slightly experimental, jazzy rock that soon smacks into a heavier, metal-style riff, but there’s also a hefty dose of atmospheric shoegaze at play, and then we’re back to a jazzier, moody and atmospheric pace. It’s wonderful, intricate and somehow both delicate and fragile, yet also hard, heavy and gritty.

This is a very well-crafted, beautifully performed song that evolves naturally around a theme. The bass tone is near perfection to my ears, the guitars function more like accompanying tone-setters than the great attention grabbers they tend to be in metal, the drums veer expertly from jazz, to rock, to metal and pretty much anything in between, and RNM’s vocals becomes the atmospheric centerpiece that ties it all together.

But, as I’ve said multiple times in the past: singles can be deceiving. Bad songs can turn good if they’re part of a great album, and vice-versa. Luckily for us, there’s two other singles for the upcoming June album out there, and they truly help paint a picture of what we can expect from We’re all going to be fine.

First of the two singles, is “Burst” and it has quite a different vibe to “Becoming”. “Burst” is a full-on instrumental and it starts off heavy and riff-driven. I get Gojira-vibes from this, including the ecological perspective. This seems to fit well, seeing as like their countrymen in Gojira, the guys behind Lost in Kyiv also harbor deep, philosophical thoughts around their art. “Burst” is well-produced, heavy, catchy and full of groove. It ends up feeling like instrumental Sepultura and I’m loving every second of it.

Finally, we have “Eclipse”. This might be the least appealing of the three singles to me, as it is a grander, more Power Metal-leaning track, but Lost in Kyiv gets away with it because they don’t lean too far into Power Metal’s cheesiness. This is classy and groovy, and less complex than you expect from a Post-Metal band, but it works. If “Eclipse” represents the lighter side of this album, then we can truly expect something special.

And for me, that’s where we’re at: we have three songs that play very well together, and if the rest of the album manages to stay consistent with these three releases, then Lost in Kyiv might manage to catapult themselves into the European elite of Post-Rock and Post-Metal. I can’t wait until June 19th.

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