Tired Cossack - ZIMA
Self-Released
Released on March 26th, 2026
Winter truly does have a peculiar way of reducing life to its bare essentials: aspiration recedes as routine becomes ritual, and survival itself is elevated to accomplishment. On Tired Cossack’s ZIMA (itself being the Ukrainian word for “winter”), released on March 26, 2026, the relentlessly testing Winnipeg winter is something greater than simple season; more than mere setting. It is a state of being. Though, while it may be tempting to focus on the city’s wintry chill, or the long cultural shadow of its Ukrainian diaspora, or even the manner in which its geography informs the record’s dreary, bleak tone, all stand secondary to the mindscape with which the record is preoccupied throughout. The cold in ZIMA is not meteorological; it is psychological – neurological, even.
With a Soviet-era post-punk drone serving dutifully as its engine, churning and shunting forward angsty shouts into the void like a rusted-out diesel locomotive, ZIMA moves like a nervous system misfiring. At times, it charges tightly and propulsively; at others, ethereally, as it grasps at states of dissociation before spastically snapping one back to its characteristic unreality.
There are records that feel composed, and others, endured. Make no mistake: ZIMA is decidedly the latter. Its songs do not feel so much as polished, complete objects as they do the haunting echoes of history and experience, contorted and pressed in the moment through anguish, noise, and fatigue. A listener is not experiencing a confessional; some recounting of events – no, you are fucking in it. This record demands to be survived. These are songs borne of sleeplessness; of a dark and all-encompassing chemical haze; of discomfort, and of fear.
The grounds upon which ZIMA treads always feel precarious. It brings together a disorienting mass of jagged post-punk, grunge, cold wave, and strong Ukrainian folk traditions, that always appear to me less a fusion of styles than a series of states, alternatively crashing and swirling into and overtaking the others, always competing; a chaos that never resolves. On its face, ZIMA is an act of catharsis, but if catharsis, at least notionally, implies some measure of release, ZIMA’s sonic and emotional states are seldom exorcised; instead, their gnashings consistently recur throughout.
In a sense, ZIMA is not simply a record about survival. It is the sound of survival in progress. In its kineticism, or perhaps because of it, ZIMA also bears a certain enduring persistence, running defiantly alongside its bleak underscoring. And what is survival if not persistence in the face of annihilation – of the self, or even, of reality itself?
Choice Cuts:
“She Was” - a hauntingly beautiful elegy “for dead friends” with an irresistible, floaty chorus. It is grief, mid-process.
“Groceries” - routine becomes compulsion as the body wakes, shakes, rinses, and repeats. Try to not shout along, I dare ya.
“ZIMA” - a hypnotic bassline drives this track, performed entirely in Ukrainian, invoking folklore imagery. A damn cool track.
