Pussy Riot

Feminist performance art collective Pussy Riot first drew worldwide scrutiny in 2012 when several members faced arrest and imprisonment for demonstrating against Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency and against graft within the Russian Orthodox church. What began as spur-of-the-moment lo-fi punk interventions in public places later grew into international touring, with the collective’s sound broadening to encompass left-field pop, dance, and hip-hop. In the early 2020s the group issued joint tracks with Tom Morello, Dorian Electra, and Big Freedia, followed in 2022 by the mixtape Matriarchy Now on Neon Gold.

The Moscow-based project originated in August 2011 as a splinter from the street-art and performance group Voina, formed expressly to counter state policies that curtailed women’s rights. Comprising a fluid roster of roughly ten to twenty participants who performed under pseudonyms while wearing vivid dresses and balaclavas, the collective staged guerrilla actions in everyday urban settings. Drawing from American riot grrrl and Oi! acts as well as from the writings of Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, Pussy Riot delivered politically pointed chants over jagged guitar bursts, nearly all of their pieces lasting less than two minutes.

Global notice intensified after a February 2012 appearance inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, during which three members reached the altar for roughly thirty seconds and delivered a mock appeal to the Virgin Mary to remove Putin from office. Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were detained while two other participants escaped. In mid-August 2012 each of the three received a two-year penal-colony sentence. The severity of the punishment, paired with the evident censorship, prompted public statements of support from Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov, riot-grrrl veteran Kathleen Hanna, former Beatle Paul McCartney, and Amnesty International, among others. Samutsevich obtained a suspended sentence in October; Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were freed in December 2013 under a blanket amnesty that Putin described as commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Russia’s post-Soviet constitution. Several months later the two founded the independent outlet Mediazona.

Throughout the first half of the 2010s the collective issued occasional Russian-language songs and videos while becoming the focus of the books Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom (2012) and Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (2014) as well as the documentaries Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer and Pussy versus Putin, both released in 2013, and Death to Prison, Freedom to Protest, which appeared the following year. Their first English-language release, the single and video “I Can’t Breathe,” arrived in early 2015.

From 2016 onward Pussy Riot grew more active as recording artists, steering their music away from raw punk toward hip-hop and dance-pop. The EP xxx contained the tracks “Make America Great Again,” accompanied by a dystopian video centered on Donald Trump, and “Straight Outta Vagina,” which featured Desi Mo and Leikeli47. Subsequent singles such as “Police State” (2017), “Bad Apples” (2018, with Dave Sitek), and “Track About Good Cop” (2018) addressed systemic injustice. The collective’s first North American tour took place in 2018. In 2019 they issued the hip-hop cuts “Black Snow,” recorded with Mara 37, and “Hangerz,” recorded with Junglepussy and Vic Mensa, both responding to Alabama’s restrictive abortion legislation. The rap-metal track “1312,” featuring Dillom and Muerejoven, surfaced in 2020, alongside the standalone singles “Knife” and “Riot.” Pussy Riot also contributed to Dorian Electra’s “My Agenda,” which included the Village People.

A second collaboration with Dorian Electra yielded the 2021 single “Toxic,” produced by 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady. That year the collective also released “Rage,” “Sexist,” and “Panic Attack,” plus additional joint recordings with Tom Morello, MARINA, Our Lady Peace, WhoKilledXIX, and others. The EP Rage Remixes collected a Boys Noize version of the title track. Neon Gold issued the 2022 mixtape Matriarchy Now, which featured Big Freedia, iLoveMakonnen, and Slayyyter.