AIGEL has unveiled “Killer Qız,” the lead single from their upcoming album of the same name, set for release on March 28. The track marks the duo’s latest effort in pushing sonic and catchy thematic elements, blending Tatar, Russian, and English elements with a sharp, confrontational edge.
Formed in 2016 by Aigel Gaisina and Ilya Baramiia, AIGEL first gained widespread attention with their album 1190 and its viral single “Tatarin”, which has amassed over 118 million YouTube views. Their politically charged 2020 video “You’re Born” earned a Silver Lion at Cannes, reinforcing their reputation for subversive storytelling. Following their forced exile due to an anti-war stance, the duo has continued to evolve, translating personal and cultural displacement into their distinct avant-garde electronic style.
Killer Qız is both a conceptual and sonic departure. The album follows the story of a DJ who assassinates a high-ranking official mid-rave before fleeing the country. Thematically, it navigates death, rebirth, and cultural identity, while musically, it blends K-pop influences with hardbass, electronic distortion, and experimental vocal layering. The project also features a track where a child gradually forgets Tatar, symbolizing linguistic assimilation.
AIGEL’s European tour begins March 20, bringing “Killer Qız” to live audiences across multiple cities. The duo continues to challenge conventions, using their music as both an artistic expression and a form of resistance.
Read our exclusive interview with AIGEL at the bottom of this article.
AIGEL’s anti-war stance led to your ban from Russia and eventual relocation. How has living in Berlin and Montenegro influenced your creative process and the themes explored in “Killer Qız”?
Aigel Gaisina: Since February 2022, I’ve been in a long creative pause—nothing was coming to me, words seemed to have lost their meaning. For three years, we were slowly finishing pre-war demo tracks and piecing ourselves back together. Emigration intensified the metaphor of searching for new words: Ilya and I now live in different countries, hear different languages, and have completely different vibes outside our windows. Mine is Berlin—harsh, stylish, kitschy, free, often overcast. Ilya’s is sunny, gentle, rural Montenegro. I believe this new blend seeps into our music in ways we don’t even notice.
Our new album is entirely in my native Tatar language and also includes our first track in German. It reflects both the political context we left behind and the experience of stepping into a new, vast world.
I am Tatar—that’s one of ethnic groups, living in Russia. Tatar is a language from the Turkic group. It is my native language alongside Russian. The Tatar people in Russia have undergone deep assimilation; many are forgetting their mother tongue. The problem of language preservation is not yet catastrophic, but it is serious. I’m lucky to be a native speaker, and it’s fascinating that after my long creative paralysis caused by the war, the first language to resurface was Tatar. It was like a factory reset—when a system crashes, it restores its default settings first.
Just a day before uploading the album to streaming platforms, we created an almost documentary-like track called Assimilation, where children, initially protesting their move to another country, slowly get used to it and begin replacing more and more of their native Tatar words with German ones. In Tatarstan I spent my whole life watching Tatar children assimilate into the Russian-speaking environment, forgetting their language and switching to Russian. Now, in Germany, it’s interesting—and a little sad—to see Russian-speaking children undergoing the same process, transitioning to German.
At the same time, after moving, I suddenly realized that, as someone with experience in assimilation and partial integration into another culture—someone with what is now called a “mixed identity”—I no longer fear losing parts of myself. Instead, I feel an incredible freedom to keep blending, to create in any language, to be part of a vast world. We now have our first track in German, and I found writing in it incredibly exciting. I feel like a child discovering a new kind of clay—with a new texture, softness, and flexibility. I studied a bit of German in school and even tried writing in it as a child, but now the language has suddenly come alive in me again, filling me with inspiration.
ILIA BARAMIIA: It took me some time to bring studio gear and build new studio. We have always worked remotely and lived in different cities, so overall this did not affect the work process.
Your ability to merge political commentary with electronic music is unique. Do you see your music as a form of protest, or is it more about personal storytelling?
Aigel Gaisina: Our tracks have always been personal stories. But the point is that in Russia, over the past ten years, the state has increasingly interfered in the personal. Our band started with an album about the Russian penitentiary system because my partner ended up in prison, and that’s how I learned firsthand about the Russian courts and prisons.
After the war began, we were banned, which completely turned our lives upside down. I don’t see myself as a political or civil activist—that’s not really my temperament. I relate more to the idea of being a reporter, trying to remember and document what I experience as truthfully as possible.
ILIA BARAMIIA: We do not pursue any special goals, except to evoke emotion in ourselves and the listener, to write a cool song. I see the uniqueness of Aigel Gaisina as a poet in the fact that she describes the environment very accurately and succinctly, sensually and with humor. That is why our first album was listened to by both prisoners and police officers. And this cannot be censored – it stops working. That is why, in particular, we could not stay in Russia.
The Tatar language has become a more prominent part of your music lately. How has reconnecting with your native language shaped your sound and lyrical approach?
Aigel Gaisina: I didn’t make a conscious switch to Tatar—I’ve always written in both languages, Russian and Tatar. Back in 2020, we released our first fully Tatar-language album, Pıyala. By the way, just a year ago, the title track of that album reached #1 on the global Shazam chart, topped national charts in about 20 countries, and entered the Billboard TikTok chart. It was the first Tatar-language song in history to achieve such success. It also sparked a beautiful trend where people started covering it in their own, often rare and even endangered languages—some of which I had never even heard of before.
When I write in Tatar and Russian, I almost feel like two different authors. Tatar is a very concise, ironic language with lots of short words, similar to English, which makes it fit perfectly into dance beats. At the same time, Tatar doesn’t have as vast or intricate literary tradition as Russian, so I feel free to be simpler, more sentimental, and more direct in Tatar, without worrying about sounding too plain.
The narrative of “Killer Qız” is bold, portraying a DJ taking down a high-ranking official with music. What inspired this storyline, and how does it reflect the current socio-political climate?
Aigel Gaisina: Yes, it’s a metaphor for the current political situation in Russia. For a long time, people in our country lived in parallel with the state—the government was one thing, and the people were another. The government was stealing, the people where surviving however they could. No one expected anything from the government—the main thing was that it didn’t interfere.
But the state is power, and power, if left unchecked, always seeks expansion. If society, like immune cells, doesn’t restrain its encroachments, the state spreads like cancer into every aspect of life. As a result, this survival strategy—where no one cares who is in power or what they are doing, where people just try to get by—has led to the state first invading private homes, with mass political imprisonments, and then seeking control over people’s minds, dictating what music they should listen to, when and how many children they should have, and what they should think about.
In the song, a government official barges onto the dance floor like a bull in a china shop, destroying everything he neither built nor understands. But in the end, he becomes so carried away by the dance that he loses control, overextends himself, and is reduced to dust.
Looking forward, how do you envision AIGEL’s sound evolving? Are there new genres or concepts you’re eager to explore in the future?
Aigel Gaisina: We never stick to specific genres—the only thing that probably draws both of us in right now is dance and club music, so our new tracks are often fast and dynamic. I think this trend will continue as long as we don’t get tired of it.
ILIA BARAMIIA: We want to broadcast more pulsating dance energy. At this time. Aigel had quiet lyrical drafts for songs – we wanted to turn them into fast and aggressive-sounding songs.
