Cyan Kicks: Empowering The Masses
What is the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the word Finland? Lapland? The Northern Lights? In the next few months, it will most likely be Cyan Kicks. The Helsinki-based alternative rock band, fronted by Susanna Alexandra, is shaping the scene and evolving the genre to their own preferences, creating a style of music laden with down-tuned guitar riffs and melodic pop hooks, mixed with electronic twists and turns that keeps even the most diverse of listeners on their toes.
After becoming national finalists for Eurovision last year, the band have quickly begun to make a name for themselves in their home nation and across Europe. This evidently was not enough for the time being, and the group instead chose to produce and refine their new album I Never Said 4ever whilst competing against the musical elites of their nation. The album itself has revolutionized the band’s sound even further, melding genres and sounds from a wide range of influences, from the modern metal that most of us know and love to sounds that wouldn’t go amiss on the soundtrack to Flashdance. These styles have been fused together to create a brand-new sound for a band that already seemed so sure of themselves.
“It’s like a whole new side of us, the whole album. I’m so excited that it’s so different – it’s so pop and so different and the themes are quite different from what we’ve released before. I’m just excited. I’m so proud,” says frontwoman Susanna Alexandra. “We’ve been talking that the next single after the album should be something a little bit crazier, but I want to keep the pop side of it; the easy side of it. I mean by saying easy, it’s a little bit easier music than what we have released before, if you can say that. I want to keep that because I really love the pop side of our new style, but something a little bit crazier maybe next time. I want that something that you don’t expect.”
It’s not a shock that Cyan Kicks want to keep up with their theme of incorporating more ‘radio friendly’ pop elements into their sound. Aside from the fact that it will help attract more listeners, it seems to give the group a sense of freedom within their writing style. When these styles are weaved throughout a heavy guitar laden track it creates a bridge between the more elitist of genres to those that are more accessible to the masses. They seem to have hit a sweet spot within the genre. “I love those kinds of things, you know, and people know our style, they never know what they get. If we’re going to release a new song, you know, like Addict, that is something you haven’t heard from us ever. It’s a club song, like a crazy party song. It’s our style and I love it that we don’t have to put ourselves in any kind of box.”
There is an obvious theme within Cyan Kicks’ music, and that is a sense of empowerment. While both female and self-empowerment may be prominent features in music across the board, it hits so much harder in the rock community; a genre that is so often misrepresented in the mainstream as aggressive. “Invincible, that we released on our EP, was the first empowering song that we’ve ever written and that feels so good because all of our songs are so dark, and the themes are so dark. I love to sing it live and I love how people feel the song; what it does to people I can see on stage. I love it, it’s so important,” says Alexandra, “after that we wrote Hurricane and that is an empowering song as well. So, I will most definitely keep on writing those kinds of songs because I really love singing about it. It’s perfect.”
While they may be empowering the masses with their music, this doesn’t exactly appease the dreaded YouTube algorithm. The group’s video for the incredibly catchy Someone Like You was recently released and swiftly shadow banned on the site. Why? Because it features a same-sex relationship. “We put our hearts in that music video and I love it. I think it’s a masterpiece. And then it just has to be shadow banned. And our label manager said that we can’t use any kind of paid marketing for it or anything. So it’s really hard to get your video out there if YouTube is not supporting it.”
It isn’t as if the audience aren’t enjoying the video, which has since been reuploaded to the site, with the top comments citing that Cyan Kicks can “do no wrong” and are “underrated” and the rest echoing the same sentiments. Regardless of whether they may understand the artistic choices or not, the audience (intended or not) appreciate the video for what it is: a piece of visual art. It doesn’t matter what percentage of the public are fans, bigotry, intentional or not, decided to rear its ugly head yet again. “There’s two girls. Oh no, let’s hide it. I hate it so much. I don’t understand, but I’m so proud we made it. I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I don’t think, ‘oh shit, why didn’t we choose a guy’ or ‘why didn’t we do it another way?’ I love it. I’m so proud of it and I believe that the people will find it. I am sure of that.” The video shines a light on the sort of content that usually goes unseen in this genre, creating a refreshing difference to the stale usual ideas we are presented with. Female-fronted music is so often seen as its own separate genre, so to push boundaries even further from this normality is verging on the revolution this scene needs. Cyan Kicks just seem to be one of the few bands brave enough to stand up and bring it to the attention of the masses.
