The woman in silver is a thousand light years from home. Like a regal visitor from ancient Themyscira, Tatiana Shmayluk shimmers beneath the bright lights of a small Los Angeles photography studio. She is the Ukrainian-born singer for Jinjer, and one of metal’s most dynamic, fastest-rising figures, clad in a gown of metallic fabric, arms smothered in tattoos, with a feathered serpent inked onto her throat.
She is quiet in front of the camera as the room is filled with a tuneful stream of alt rock hits from the 80s and 90s: The Cult, Nirvana, Social Distortion, all of it edgy and emotionally raw, but far removed from the intricate prog metal storm and precise math rock impulses of Jinjer. Asked if she would prefer a different soundtrack for this session, maybe something louder and more aggro, Tatiana says she is absolutely fine with it. “I listen to Tchaikovsky when I’m not onstage,” she adds with a smile.
Like the rest of Jinjer, she has settled into a new home outside of Ukraine, while her home country is at war with Russia. It’s an unsettling contrast, as the band continues its steady rise, with new album Duél powered by Tatiana’s superhuman range, shifting effortlessly from clean to screaming vocals, from the purely melodic to the purely enraged. On the album cover is the image of two bullets, abstract splashes of blood and what appears to be a gunshot wound – a sign of the times she’s living in.
A few steps outside is the fabulous Sunset Strip, playground to generations of heavy movers, from Led Zeppelin and Motörhead to Guns N’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction, but Tati’s spent little time on this glamorous stretch of boulevard, preferring the domestic bliss of Southern California with her husband, drummer Alex Lopez (formerly of Suicide Silence), out in the Orange County suburbs.
While Tatiana now lives safely in the US, the rest of her band remain scattered in Europe: guitarist Roman Ibramkhalilov and drummer Vladislav ‘Vladi’ Ulasevich live in Warsaw, Poland, and bassist Eugene Abdukhanov is in Bulgaria. Their crew is based in Germany. But in 2024, all of them reconvened in Poland to record Duél, creating another fiery collision of genres: metalcore, djent, prog, nu metal, groove, even reggae.
Later, Tatiana sits on the outdoor patio as the afternoon turns cold. She’s bundled up in a fuzzy grey jacket as she lights up a cigarette. The singer speaks excellent English, a student of the language for 10 years in school. This interview will end up being her longest to date. Offstage, Tati is softly spoken and refers to herself as an introvert, but live she is in total command: strolling and stomping across the stage, leaning over the edge to preside over a frantic circle-pit, falling to her knees and bouncing back up to wail, swinging her hair back and forth.
“I’m a hermit. I like to be unseen, but somehow I do this,” she says of her career with a laugh.
On Duél, she is refining her approach, layering guttural and melodic vocals in more sophisticated arrangements. In part, the title refers to rebirth, letting go of your old flawed self in order to find a new, improved version. It is about the ‘duel’ with one’s self, and the casting off of bad habits. Some of the new songs reflect her decision to quit drinking. On the swirling Green Serpent, she alternates between her most raging and most delicate: ‘Please add some sober water / into heady wine. Don’t turn into a raging storm / This peaceful night.’
“It wasn’t a serious problem,” Tati says of her drinking issues on the road. “The thing is, our people, like Ukrainians and Russians, we have to deal with that by ourselves. There’s no such thing as going to rehab for that.”
Even so, as the singer typically refuelled and loosened up for her stunning performances, she felt herself slipping into an unhealthy pattern.
“I tour all the time, so that means that I drink all the time, like almost every day. Right before the show, after the show,” she adds. “And then I started getting aggressive at my bandmates. I got into a fight, and then the next morning I felt so bad, like mentally, so I said, ‘I don’t want to do it anymore.’ I’m uncontrollable when I drink, so I don’t know what happens next. I stopped and it was pretty easy. I still like to be around people who drink, because I still enjoy that vibe of people getting drunk and getting all funny and happy and everything.”
Tatiana stayed sober for two years, then celebrated the milestone with her husband by having a drop of Prosecco.
“I learned how to control myself, and I learned a lot,” she says, choosing moderation over abstinence, though she’ll no longer drink on the road. “I never gave a promise to myself that I will never drink again. I just wanted to control it, you know?”
Tatiana’s story begins in eastern Ukraine. Between drags on her cigarette, she begins to discuss her musical evolution: “I started listening to Russian rock music when I was nine because of my elder brother and…”
She stops as an ominous rumbling fills the air, and laughs. “What can it be?” she wonders, as the sound grows louder and closer. Finally, the noise is above and she looks up to see a quartet of US military Osprey aircraft – part aeroplane, part helicopter, and loud as fuck. “Oh, shit…”
It’s a weird show of military muscle right above the Strip, heading east in formation as if they’re preparing to attack the Hollywood Bowl. If the moment is a reminder of her war-ravaged home country, she does not say. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the peaceful coexistence between border nations, where the locals once seemed close and neighbourly, has been shattered by conflict and civilian death. Things are now impossibly delicate and complicated. It clearly weighs on Tati, but she says she simply cannot discuss the war in Ukraine.
The subject has been the source of threats, attacks and nasty rumours online directed at her and the rest of Jinjer. But she grew up in the Donbas region, which is now mostly under Russian occupation. This may or may not have inspired the new song Tumbleweed, and the anguished lyrics: ‘Have you heard of the storm / That uprooted my home? / A shower crushed down / On my beautiful town.’
“It’s a song about refugees,” she says. “That is because of war or whatever is going on in your country. You have to leave, you have to roam around the world, finding your own place, but you cannot find it.”
For Tatiana, her small town in Ukraine was where she discovered her love for music. As a girl, she’d been a fanatic for The Offspring. Her evolution as a listener took her young ears from pop-punk to grunge to nu metal to groove metal and much more. That range of musical obsessions would prepare her well for the career ahead of her.
“I watched a lot of MTV when I was a kid,” she says with a laugh. “Even when I was, like, four years old, I sang and I screamed so loud that my mom said that I had a hernia because of that.”
She also drew pictures of herself onstage, singing and playing guitar, performing with other girls in an all-female group. By the age of 14, she was singing in a band. Her first concert as a fan was Soulfly, requiring several hours on the train to Kyiv with her boyfriend, smoking and partying along the way. Her first tattoo – of a bumble bee – appeared on her back at age 17. After that, she got one of Clown from Slipknot (which she got to show him backstage years later).
The direction Tati’s life was heading in was confounding to her parents. Her father worked in a mercury plant, and her mother was an accountant. All this loud music, and the tattoos, didn’t seem like a path towards a career and marriage.
“They didn’t like it at first, ’cause they are old-school people,” the singer says. “They wanted me to get a good education, find a job, get married, have kids. Nothing of this happened. I mean, I got married, but my job is far from what they wanted me to do. But now they are supportive."
“I’m really shy and I followed their instructions. But at some point I went against their will – quietly. I didn’t make scenes or anything. I was cutting classes and going to rehearsals.”
She first tried out a guttural vocal sound in a local deathcore band in 2004. “That’s when I realised that I can do it,” she says. “I trained. I really wanted to, and it was really hard for me to train myself.”
Tati took some inspiration from Melissa Cross, master screamer and heavy metal vocal coach, known for proselytising her ‘Zen of Screaming’. But she mostly learned by the example of Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe and other male screamers. Her goal was to reach a level where gender was not an issue.
“I wanted to be as good as them, so that you even cannot tell that it’s a girl singing,” she says.
At the same time, she kept a more traditionally feminine, emotional, melodic vocal ability as part of her repertoire. In time, it would become a key element in her singing style: “I felt like it was so tough to be that person who can do both – and to do it not as a garage band, but bring it to the new level, to have really technical, really good-quality vocals.”
In Ukraine, Tati was friendly with a year-old metal band called Jinjer. She was invited to step in for one small local show, since the founding singer, Maksym Fatullaiev, was leaving for the US. In the Donbas, there weren’t many screamers available, and since Tati’s own deathcore band had recently disintegrated, she agreed. Things went well enough that she continued with the band, and rearranged the vocal parts of their existing songs to suit her tastes (Maks now sings in the band Evermorphing, who sometimes share stages with Jinjer).
Jinjer self-released the EP Inhale, Do Not Breathe in 2012, and the album Cloud Factory in 2014. That year, conflict in eastern Ukraine led the band to pack up and relocate west. They signed to Napalm Records in time to release their second album, King Of Everything, in 2016, and then moved to the relative safety of the capital, Kyiv, in 2017.
“Little by little, I turned it into mine,” she says of Jinjer with a laugh. “And that’s when I started liking it.”
The real turning point for Tatiana and Jinjer was the song Pisces, from King Of Everything. The track begins with a delicate and graceful vocal, before shifting into the depths of guttural despair, the singer’s wide-ranging vocal abilities front and centre. It went viral, spawning numerous reaction videos. The lyrics, written by Tatiana and bassist Eugene, move from the cosmic to the earthbound.
“I started believing that this kind of music… it still has a chance to be played at big festivals, big tours in other countries, all around the world,” the singer says now. “That was our ticket to bigger stages.”
After King Of Everything, the band’s sound shifted again, with the arrival of drummer Vladislav Ulasevich, who also began writing material for Jinjer. That first showed itself on 2019’s Macro.
“It was a starting point of us going in a different direction,” Tatiana explains, “being less understandable, more complicated, but mixing different genres as well.”
Not every fan approved, but Tatiana was happy to go deeper. “We don’t care if people like it. That’s the thing – you cannot be a people-pleaser all the time,” she says with a smile. “We are being ourselves, and music is the vessel for that. And if you don’t like it, that’s why they’re called followers. You are following, you’re not dictating to us what to do. So if you don’t like it, don’t follow. It’s that simple. We don’t owe anyone. We just owe it to ourselves to stay true… We’ve never been a commercial project.”
By the time Wallflowers landed in 2021, Jinjer’s popularity had exploded well beyond their Ukrainian roots, with slots on major festival stages. That success came with new opportunities to tour and spread their messages.
“To see the world, to know a lot of cultures, to communicate with other people, it helped me grow as a personality, to expand my vision,” says Tati.
Wallflowers came after Covid-19 upturned the music world, and the band-members left Ukraine and scattered around the world. Tati had already begun her relationship with Alex Lopez in 2019, and got married during the first pandemic year of 2020. But with her work visa about to expire, she had to leave for Ukraine two weeks after her marriage. She waited an entire year there as Covid got under control and visas were available again.
Her new husband would visit for a month at a time, then have to return to the US. By 2021, she was finally settled in Southern California. She was already obsessed with Latino-American ‘cholo’ culture, drawn to the aesthetics and attire of Chicano gang life, from bouncing low rider cars to ornate black-and-white tatts. Early on, she also followed the lead of singer Sandra Nasi´c from the German band Guano Apes, and likewise wore baggy jeans, boots and tank-tops. That look faded as her many influences coalesced into a recognisable style that fit with the music of Jinjer.
“Little by little, as we made progressive music, I wanted to wear progressive clothing, since we sing about the cosmos and space and stuff,” Tati says of her personal style choices. “So it eventually turned into something futuristic. I started wearing futuristic stuff – and glowy make-up – to be out of this world.”
Making the new album while living in different countries wasn’t ideal. Before Covid and the war, they had always lived near one another, ready to practise and record together at will. For Duél, the band-members reconvened in Warsaw for months of work, and Tatiana rented an apartment for the long haul. They built a small vocal booth in their practice space and plugged into a laptop. Scattered or not, Jinjer have found a way not only to continue, but to keep pushing their music forward, even as their homeland is under a cloud.
The words on Duél travel meaningfully from the internal struggles of depression (Dark Bile) to larger crises of war and societal oppression (Rogue) that remain out of anyone’s control. As ever, Tatiana sings almost everything in English, which is how it’s been since the band started with Maks (aside from an occasional Russian-language verse here and there). For the singer, the reason is obvious. “We wanted to be known all around the world,” says Tatiana. “And I had a message to bring.”
Duél is out now via Napalm. Jinjer play Download Festival on June 15.
