Karaka-based musician VÏKAE (Veronika Bell) has released a string of emotionally charged alt-pop music throughout her career. ‘Doomsday Collective’ is the name Ukrainian-born dark-pop artist has given newest body of work, which teeters across the same timelines and energetic landscape as previous releases, except she’s levelled up. Michaela Tempany talked with her ahead of the late November album release.
‘Doomsday Collective’ serves as a gathering of fragments, a collection of songs written across the past five years. Vikae’s calling it an anthology, a sonic archive of both collapse and creation.
“I see an anthology as a collection of poems,” she explains. “It’s literally fragments of a bunch of albums that didn’t make it.”
Her music shifts between electro-pop, dark pop, and cinematic alt-electronica, consistently with a lyrical bite. Following up on 2023 album ‘Love Games’, and the storytelling of her 2020 EP ‘Finelines’ EP, Vikae consciously chose a different approach to collating ‘Doomsday Collective’.
“It’s interesting,” she says, “because I don’t know if it even is a shift – because I like all of these genres and I find it really difficult to stick to one, to be honest! But I think there was a period of time where I really wanted to have the songwriting shine, and that was kind of what the ‘Love Games’ EP was. Again, it was like a collection of a storyline that actually did work together. In this way, it was different, it was more like an album.”
Her new anthology is a Europop treat. Dark and danceable, it’s laced with Swift-like lyrical stylings and Charlie XCX electro-pop.
“During lockdown I was discovering my neuro-divergency and my special interest became Taylor Swift, and in particular, her syntax and how she wrote her 1989 album. I went deep into analysing her music, which songs were popular and why they were popular, and I guess it came back to Max Martin and Shellback and their writing, as they were collaborators together.
“I just kind of lost myself, I think, for a little bit. And that’s an important piece of the puzzle. Pop can be fun. It’s okay to like basic pop music because it’s good for a reason.”
You can definitely hear those influences across the dozen tracks, alongside the anthology’s connecting thread of approaching social and planetary break down.
“‘Doomsday Collective’ is definitely connected by the feeling of impending doom – that these are our last days. Like all of these once-in-a-lifetime events that are happening to us…
“Rust, for example, which I’ve already released, that was from about March 2022. [‘All the same, numbers game, freedom is falling, rusts away.’] You’ve also got the tongue and cheek of Swipe Right, where in a digital age we’re scrolling for options. [‘I just might, might swipe right.’] It’s the way that humans are making connections, and it’s kind of weird, part of that doomsday vibe.”
It’s a lightbulb moment when she adds, “There’s just so much shit happening that I feel like this is my response to all of it.”
Influenced heavily by the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, it’s also hard to ignore that Vikae’s family history is filled with once-in-a-lifetime events, such as political upheaval and war.
“My grandmother, my babushka, she was a refugee in Siberia for quite a considerable amount of time… for years during World War II. It was a pretty terrible time obviously for them and the Ukrainian language was very much suppressed. So, my family spoke Russian, I spoke Russian, you know, growing up. I just thought, ‘How amazing would it be to bring that part of myself into my music?’ And that’s kind of a big step, right?”
A still strong connection to her homeland is most evident in the bi-lingual tracks ТЫ МОЙ ОКЕАН (You’re My Ocean), sung in English and Russian, and БІЖІТЬ, ВИХОДЬТЕ (u have a fetish for the apocalypse), which is half-Ukrainian and half-English. She also switches languages with the chorus repeat at the tail end of recent club-beat single Swipe Right.
Musically Vikae admits being heavily influenced by Eurovision and Europop as a genre, with synth-driven and dance-oriented electronica in evidence throughout the album.
“I wanted to write songs in a way where you can still kind of feel like a bad bitch when you’re listening to it,” she grins. “You still kind of want to sing along. You still want to, you know, show up and be fierce!”
In this, Vikae has succeeded. There are songs about billionaires and money distribution, late-capitalist dependence and working a corporate day job. Eat The Rich is an obvious example. All are danceable, sing-able, and filled with hooks.
The doomsday theme bleeds into the tactical recording of the album which, in the spirit of a global pandemic and national lockdowns, was captured mostly in bedrooms – with the aid of longtime producer Abigail Knudson (aka Missy).
First working together on her 2020 debut EP, the pair have collaborated extensively across Vikae’s now extensive body of music.
“It’s a friendship that I cherish very very much,” Vikae says. “And I think when you have musical chemistry like that with somebody, that’s something to cherish. We’ve had a lot of fun making music over the years. We just seem to, you know, come back to doing that because again there’s that power in community. Abby met me at a time when nobody knew what was wrong with me and I was really not well, and she was one of the very few people that stuck around.
“When I started working with Abby I was 100% exclusively a songwriter. I had recorded an album before with a previous band, but I had no idea how you even put music on the radio. I come from classical jazz land, where they just didn’t teach us that.
“Anyway, throughout the years, I guess I became a lot more interested in it and a lot more aware of how important it was to understand the fundamentals. And so although I would not consider myself a co-producer necessarily on this record, in the traditional sense, I know which instruments I want to go where, and how I want the drums to be.”
Community (or lack of) is another dominant concept throughout the release.
“Ultimately, music is about connection. It’s about getting people together in a room. So it doesn’t matter how many people have actually listened to it. I think that’s what we should be aiming for in 2025, realistically as independent musicians. I don’t know if that’s, like, a controversial take or not, but I feel like when you’re working with, you know, no label, no budget, you kind of have to focus on making a community.”
Recorded over the past six years, the album includes creative use of some everyday household items.
“And honestly recorded predominantly in bedrooms. Like at one point we had like a sock over the mic because we didn’t have a pop filter. It was very DIY. I think we sampled me hitting a lettuce somewhere, and there’s definitely a zipper, and there’s a pill bottle shaking around.”
She doesn’t think it wise for artists to run themselves into debt just to make their art look good. “You can make your art good without sacrificing your health, your money, your bills. Most of the music videos were done with my iPhone.”
Vikae uses her still developing skills in her day job as a community facilitator.
“I teach people with disabilities how to use different music technologies, like synths and production and that kind of thing. And I reckon I could produce a pretty solid demo now. So that’s pretty sick. I feel like that’s a really cool evolution and I will say that Abby inspired that.”
The type of work she does sits close to home for the artist, who also lives with Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) and bipolar disorder. She’s very open about living with both physical and mental health issues.
“It’s been a really rough ride over these past five years… I can’t necessarily perform the way I may have once been able to, like physically. But I can put that performance into my lyricism, and I can put that performance into my voice. So, I really do hope that it is kind of almost obvious which songs, you know, were released a while ago and which songs are new – by the vocals. I guess it’s almost like my older self talking to my younger self.”
Operator explores the artist’s lived dilemma with irony.
“I called Helpline and they were like, ‘Oh, hang on. Let me just put you on hold.’ It was one of those things that I was just like, ‘Man, this shit is cooked’, and I think it’s actually okay to be writing about it because there’s a lot of things that are going on. But as I said before, you have to find community in all of that chaos. That’s the important thing in real life, person-to-person interaction. And I hope we don’t lose sight of that in a world of AI and all that stuff.”
Ultimately her ‘Doomsday Collective’ is about an artist reclaiming her identity, moving through rebellion and rebirth in a world that is growing increasingly disconnected.
“Yeah, the journey’s hard,” she says. “But you’ve got to grow. And then you’ve got to grind in your creative life, too. And that’s just the way that it goes. But no diamond is ever found without, you know, hard work.”
Vikae finishes the conversation with an Easter egg.
“It’s really important that ‘Doomsday Collective’ is heard before the next project because this is the start of it. Please expect these themes to continue. Please expect these themes to be explored. I’m really excited for what’s about to come next.”
