Since fleeing Ukraine seven years ago, Jinjer have become one of metal’s biggest international success stories. But vocalist Tatiana is still figuring out where she belongs

WORDS: RICH HOBSON

PICTURES: ALINA CHERNOHOR

At least once a day, when I’m home in my apartment, I catch myself thinking, ‘I wish I could go home.But I have no idea what that actually means.”

For Jinjer frontwoman Tatiana Shmayluk, home is a nebulous concept. Having spent the better part of a decade on the road, her Kiev apartment – the setting for today’s Zoom chat – has been little more than a glorified storage space. Case in point: when COVID hit, rather than rushing back, she decided to stay in the US, waiting with terminal optimism for everything to blow over so they could continue their tour of the Americas.

But then, neither Tatiana nor her bandmates are actually from Kiev. Growing up, ‘home’ was Gorlovka, a small city in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast region. But in 2014 they were forced to leave their childhood homes and families behind, when war broke out between Ukrainian armed forces and Russian-backed separatists.

For the next 18 months, home was a run-down apartment near the Polish border, often living without basic amenities such as heating, electricity or water, and facing discrimination from locals due to their origins in the Eastern part of Ukraine. Little wonder, then, that this was when the band began to play shows internationally, opting to fill their calendars rather than bemoan their lot.