Залупа Rock

ZLYI REPER ZENYK — ZALUPA ROCK

Kuzma Skryabin’s cult alter ego. Nine uncensored tracks. On vinyl for the first time.

Zlyi Reper Zenyk is the outrageous alter ego of Andriy Kuzmenko, better known as Kuzma Skryabin, and one of the most uncompromising sides of his creative legacy.

There is none of the lyrical Kuzma behind some of Ukraine’s biggest radio hits here. Instead, there is Zenyk — a grotesque character who looks at the world around him and talks about it in a way you would never hear on television: crude, absurd, hilarious, sometimes uncomfortable, and completely uncensored.

Kuzma himself described Zenyk as his singing pseudonym and stressed that he was “not a show-business entity.” The character gave him the freedom to go where ordinary irony was no longer enough.

Behind the profanity, mixed-language slang and deliberate crudeness lies something Kuzmenko did exceptionally well: observing people and exposing the absurdity around him. Everyday life, politics, labor migration, television, mass culture, stereotypes, money and status — everything became material for his satire.

In 2012, this world took shape as Zalupa Rock — nine tracks and 27 minutes of Zenyk at full force:

“Ispaniia,” “Ty Dokhuia Pyzdysh,” “Honduras,” “Metalisty,” “Pizdiets,” “Karakulieva Shuba,” “Baba z Khuiom,” “HMO,” “Razom Nas Bahato.”

The song titles alone should make one thing clear: censorship was never part of the plan.

Zalupa Rock is much more than a collection of Kuzma’s profanity and jokes.

Today, the album sounds like a time capsule — a caricature of Ukraine in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Its language, television, politics, labor migration, everyday stereotypes and the absurdities of daily life are all captured and pushed to their extremes.

Beneath its deliberately unserious surface, you can hear one of Kuzmenko’s defining qualities: his ability to read the society around him with remarkable precision and speak about it in a voice that could never be mistaken for anyone else’s.

For those who know Skryabin through songs such as “Spy Sobi Sama,” “Stari Fotohrafii” or “Mistsia Shchaslyvykh Liudei,” Zenyk reveals a completely different Kuzma.

Crude. Provocative. Absurd. Free.

“Wait. This is Kuzma too?!”

Yes. And this, too, is part of his creative legacy.

Fourteen years after its original release, Zalupa Rock is being released on vinyl for the first time.

An album born outside the rules of show business, and one that spent years living a life of its own, finally takes physical form.

Zlyi Reper Zenyk — Zalupa Rock.
For the first time on vinyl.