In a world of noise, IC3PEAK are finding radicality in the quiet

In the corner of Anastasia Kreslina’s room in Riga, a small crucifix hangs by the door. Other than the artefact, the walls are blank, with scant markers of a space well lived in. While she speaks from the country of her birth, Kreslina, better known as Russian duo IC3PEAK’s singer Nastya, has been on the move over the past couple of years.

“Since I left Russia, I haven’t been anywhere for more than two or three months in a row,” Nastya explains. “I’ve spent some time in LA, Berlin, Paris, Istanbul, Italy, I was recently in Portugal for two months, but I always come back to Latvia.”

Nastya doesn’t believe in God. In a visual juxtaposition, she’s wearing a hoodie topped with devil horns – and she’s not satanic either. But growing up in Moscow to Latvian parents, religion, and particularly its symbolism, was everywhere. When she was younger, her mother was an opera singer who sang in a church choir, and Nastya spent countless hours in houses of worship, gazing at the imposing architecture and intricate interiors.

“I am very interested in religion, because it’s in my roots,” she says. “In my previous home in Russia there were many, many crosses on the wall behind my bed. Everywhere I go, I take a cross with me – when I put it somewhere on the wall, it makes the place feel like home.”

Nastya has been on a hunt for that feeling – the ephemeral, often difficult to place, sensation of home – ever since she left Russia in the aftermath of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Her search is the subject of IC3PEAK’s new album Coming Home, which the band released on Friday, January 31, with minimal warning. Fleeing the country was a decision she didn’t take lightly, even though she still had “layers of anxiety” when she was still living there.

“It was shocking and wasn’t expected, and I had to leave the week after [the invasion],” she says. “I packed some stuff and just left. It was obvious that we’d have to speak out about what’s going on, and to have an opportunity to do that, I couldn’t stay in Russia because it wasn’t safe. It was a life changing moment for me – I realised from the very start that for a very, very long period of time that I wouldn’t be able to go back.”

The majority of the LP was recorded in Berlin, where Nick (real name Nikolay Kostylev) – IC3PEAK’s producer and composer – has been living for the past four years. Leaving was an easier choice for him, having grown frustrated with the state of things. “I was never really in love with Moscow – every time I travelled, I felt relaxed and relieved,” he says. The room that he’s speaking from looks more settled, with filled floating bookshelves lining the walls, a large cheese plant and an oversized arching floor lamp behind him. “I had all this baggage, this feeling of the regime tightening. I left and never really looked back.”

Having made their names with politically charged, avant-garde electronic music that saw them face crackdowns and censorship from Russian authorities, Coming Home is their most intimate, introverted record yet. Gone mostly are the menacing, punky, electro-slash-trap textures, replaced instead with guitars, live drums and floating pads – all topped and tied together with Nastya’s ever ethereal vocals.

It's a departure from their discography so far, which has been typically pumped with rebellion and abrasion. Yet while that raw edge was born out of frustration with the world around them, the same applies to their new music. “The album is mostly guitar music, in the broadest sense – there are a lot of live instruments,” says Nick. “I think technology is becoming so good that it pushes me away. It makes me crave simplicity, human stupidity, and vulnerability.”

He speaks as AI music takes up increasing online space and streaming platforms, often mimicking artists, their production styles and even their voices. “Machines will make as good music as we do, and maybe even better in some fucked up way,” he continues. “But what they probably will never do better, is come in front of you with a guitar, give you eye contact, and sing you a song. So live music became the last bastion of fully expressing myself and not being confronted by something more powerful that I don’t understand.”

For Nastya, who has been using her voice and words to speak truth to power for the best part of a decade, the anger lost its venom. “We want to become calmer – I don’t think it’s connected to growing up or becoming more serious, it’s just the timing,” she says, speaking at a pointed, considered pace. “Right now, it seems pointless to scream with everything in your art – all the screaming, the online quarrels, the noise is so much, it sucks out your energy.”

And being away from home, sound needs to travel further to reach it. Maybe, she says, being quiet is the answer. “It’s not like before, when your loud voices and screaming [felt like] they could change something,” she adds. “I want more silence. Silence is very radical right now, and sometimes I have this big wish to become silent and invisible – maybe go to a monastery.”

Originally meeting when they were around 15 years old, Nick and Nastya have parallel and intertwining stories, though they are hazy on the details about how and where they first crossed paths. Both grew up in Moscow having been born outside of Russia – Nastya in Latvia, and Nick in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent – and they moved to the capital in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Both also had musical upbringings. While Nastya was in church listening to the choir, Nick was pushed towards classical music by his mother, who was a piano player and a doctorate in music, while his father was the conductor of an orchestra. Despite the heritage, he didn’t take to it with enthusiasm. “She tried the classical way, and I was extremely contrarian with everything in school,” Nick recalls, speaking with typical wryness. “I refused to learn notes – I remembered where everybody put their fingers and just did the same.”

Of course, for most people, remembering patterns at lightning speed over a keyboard is usually a more difficult way to learn an instrument compared to reading sheet music, but looking back at his younger years, deliberately doing things differently has been a consistent thread. “I’m so contrarian that I’m contrarian against myself two years ago – I hate the shit that I’ve done, and I just want to do the exact opposite of what I did.”

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the fallout “completely broke” Nick’s family, and he moved with his mother to Moscow when he was four years old. As a teenager, he came across a dusty photograph of his father playing a bass guitar, which completely switched his attitude. “It was from years ago, a black-and-white picture,” he recalls. “I was like: ‘Shit, okay. I guess I’m a musician now.’”

Nastya, on the other hand, took to the education system kindlier to her bandmate. She had a “lonely” childhood, particularly at home, but school provided respite for that. Within the walls of formal education, she could chat and play with friends and take some early learnings from the world around her.

But like Nick, she also faced similar reluctance while sat in front of a set of ebony and ivory keys. “Maybe I was lazy, maybe I was too rebellious,” she says. “As a child you can’t explain why you should be sitting there, playing piano and doing these stupid exercises that literally give pain to your fingers.”

Afterwards, she took a short stint in art school, where she formed a noise band with four other girls. With brash sounds and lyrics that called into question the world around them, there were early signs of the fingerprints that would later come to define IC3PEAK. “We were circumventing different toys and instruments, and playing noise – having fun,” she remembers. “It had social commentary, and was a feminist group, so it was a little bit less about the music, where you listen to it and think: ‘Wow, it’s beautiful.’ It was more of a statement.”

Such interrogation of surroundings via music always came naturally to Nastya, who as a young woman in the ’00s saw plenty to speak out about, and with the nascent days of the world wide web that stretched freely beyond borders, she had developed a language to articulate herself. “Even though Moscow is one of the most comfortable cities in Russia, it was weird,” she explains. “Especially as a girl sometimes, it was dangerous, and you were used to feeling small and powerless as a child and a teenager – the world seemed cruel, cold and uncaring. The internet shaped my attitude a lot, what I would read and watch, and I think I saw myself not as a Russian citizen, but a citizen of the internet.”

In the late ’00s, the pair attended dubstep parties together, where both Nick and Nastya had their first electronic music epiphanies. Small capacity venues, deep, meditative wobs of sub bass, and a tight-knit underground community. At Nick’s first ever dubstep party, its promoters had flown over genre innovator and legendary label and party DMZ’s co-founder Coki, as well as BBC Radio 1 DJ and early dubstep platformer Mary Anne Hobbs.

“Dubstep was what actually started my intense focus on music,” Nick says. “It was pre-brostep and the energy was fucking insane – they played the Mr Vot remix of Major Lazer’s ‘Pon De Floor’ and it was crazy. It just has three instruments and worked so well on the soundsystem.”

Nick’s early productions focused on club music, but after a few years of producing and DJing, he had started to become tired of the way that the sonics were evolving. Deep sub bass morphed into angry screeching as dubstep became a global phenomenon, and the likes of Skrillex and Caspa & Rusko were taking the sound in a different direction to the genre’s roots.

“I was really into dystopian ’70s ambient music, and had become disillusioned with the dubstep and electronic music scene in Russia and post-USSR countries,” Nick says. “Everybody started to want something more intense, the brostep era came and everything became loud and obnoxious.”

It was ultimately how IC3PEAK first began over a decade ago, though their conception came from something of an accident. “IC3PEAK actually started as a joke – I did this weird ambient track, and I thought: ‘Nobody is going to fucking listen to that,’” he continues. “So I got angry, and then put this intense trap beat over it, and Nastya screamed over it for fun. We were literally laughing and there were like two words in there, but it became our first track ‘Quartz’.”

Although it might seem strange that an act who have been held up as a symbol for Russian youth resistance began as a gag, revisit much of IC3PEAK’s back catalogue, and there’s humour everywhere. Their 2022 single and music video ‘Kiss of Death’ sees the pair pastiche a twee countryside folk scene, eating a picnic while Nastya wears a crown of flower, before jump switching into a horror scene while Nick plays the guitar with vulture talons. Even their strapline, self-describing themselves as “audiovisual terrorists”, is funny. “I think there was a lot of irony in what we did before, and a lot of things,” says Nick. “Like our music videos, I consider them jokes – the Russian government did not.”

After ‘Quartz’, IC3PEAK quickly began to build a cult following in Russia, garnering attention for their neo-gothic aesthetics, politically charged lyrics and music videos, and their experimental sound that blended Nick’s apocalyptic productions with Nastya’s flip-flopping vocals that switched between folky falsetto to full-on screamo. They made music prolifically, which ultimately came to a head towards the end of 2018 when they released their LP СКАЗКА / Fairy Tale, and in particular the music video for their single ‘Смерти Больше Нет / Death No More’.

Set in front of Moscow landmark buildings and traditional Russian centres of power, including the Russian White House and the Kremlin, it sees the pair cut into a raw slab of red meat, drink shots of blood and play patty cake, while Nastya douses herself in petrol. Soundtracking it, she half-sings, half-whispers in Russian: “I fill my eyes with kerosine / Let it all burn, let it all burn / The whole of Russia is watching me.”

Their tour across Russia in its aftermath saw a response from the Russian authorities, who the pair claimed were “shutting down every IC3PEAK concert in Russia” by threatening venue owners who had booked them and cutting off sound midway through shows, while also placing Nick and Nastya under “illegal surveillance” and following them in unmarked cars as they travelled around the country.

It was an eventuality that Nick and Nastya were prepared for. “We knew that it was going to be a terrible, terrible thing to do, but we also thought that there was no option,” says Nick. “Because now they had come for us, if we didn’t [take a] stand then we would have to stop performing at all – and that happened to some artists as well.”

The situation saw widespread international press coverage and cemented their status as leading lights for Russian youth art and activism. But it was also a hugely difficult time for the pair, who despite remaining defiant, had to contend with the creeping spectre of the authorities and encroachments on their self expression.

“The problems we had with the government became physical – they were literally touching us and stopping us from performing, censoring us,” says Nastya. “Then what we did became much more explicit, because in some sense it was a survival mechanism to talk about these things – hopefully people could hear and maybe take notice and bring awareness, so other musicians could be free to do what they want to do.”

Since then, the tide of cracking down against artists and musicians who are critical of the Russian government has continued to turn – a bitter truth that is not lost on Nick. “It was like if somebody came to your house, entered without invitation, and prevented you from doing your favourite thing, which is making music,” he recalls. “And I am talking about it now, at a time when nothing like that would be remotely possible in Russia – if they wanted to prevent our concert, we would just be in jail.”

With the commencement of the full-scale Russian invasion, several musicians and artists faced crackdowns as a result of their work. In 2023, artist Alexandra Skochilenko was imprisoned for knowingly spreading false information about the Russian army (she has since been released), while last year, Lyusya Shtein, a member of longtime anti-Putin activist punk band Pussy Riot, was sentenced in absentia to six years for posting anti-war messages on social media.

War and censorship led a generation of young Russians to decide to leave the country, with estimates that up to one million people left the country between 2002 and 2003. Coming Home, then, is an album that speaks to those stories and experiences. Even though the music is softer, and more removed from the grips of the Russian authorities, their messaging, which interweaves between the personal and political throughout. On its opening track, ‘Господи, прости меня / O Lord, forgive me’, Nastya sings: “The cross on my chest is a burn mark of eternal flame / I don’t remember my home.”

The project is a reminder of the difficulties that people face when leaving home under contexts of repression, even if, as Nastya remains keen to stress, that the situation is much more traumatic for Ukrainians. It’s why she brings crucifixes with her wherever she goes, even though she isn’t religious.

And it’s why the Coming Home’s cover art features religious symbolism too, with Nick and Nastya donning angel wings while walking hand-in-hand towards a house on fire. When Nastya was young and spending countless hours on the internet, learning about the world around her, she’d watch films from across the world, which helped to shape her view of it, as well as back at home.

“I got some big traumas from watching some really dark cinema, but at the same time some eye opening things,” she says. “There’s a Scandinavian film that I watched years ago called Lilya 4-ever, and the image on the cover art, I think it was deep in my unconscious from this movie – it’s about a girl living in a very poor city in Russia, who becomes a sex worker, and they sell her to Sweden. Then this image came up and after I was trying to connect the dots and remembered the movie, and cried for a week.”

With Nastya mining long hidden fragments of her influences from the distant past, there’s something of a resolution to the album – a finality that has evaded her since February 2022. “What is home? Is it a person, or is it a place? Or is it a very feeling you search for,” she asks. “I’ve been on this search for almost three years after I left Russia completely, and realised that I can’t catch this feeling, I can’t find it. But when I come back to music and art, and write songs, it feels like coming home.”

Coming Home is out now.

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