Dora released the album “Lovesongs”

She looks more and more like another pop star Anna Asti (and even dedicated a song to her) - and now she is also hiding from military censorship in romantic fairy tales

On October 18, “Lovesongs” was released, the fourth studio album by Dora (real name Daria Shikhanova). The singer finally left cut rock - that’s what she called her early tracks about first loves and disappointments: now she is a real pop diva, and her main theme is self-acceptance. We tell you how the artist’s transformation rhymes with the changes in the Russian music industry.

Since the beginning of the full-scale war, Dora has twice been blacklisted as artists. In the first days of the invasion, she postponed the release of the album “Miss”, scheduled for February 25, and wrote on social networks “Hate will not solve anything” and “Let’s live in peace” (the posts have now been deleted). In July, Dora’s album presentation was disrupted : online platforms stopped selling tickets for the concert, and the artist wrote in her story that the performance was being postponed for reasons beyond her and the organizers’ control.

As one of Meduza’s interlocutors said , the concert organizers allegedly “asked” for the singer, and she was able to perform again—but not for long. Already in February 2024, she announced the cancellation of concerts in Saratov, Voronezh and Yekaterinburg, without specifying the reason. The singer did not respond to Meduza’s request for comment.

At the same time, even before the full-scale war, they began to actively write about Dora and another artist Maby Baby in right-wing public pages, Kholod noted . At first, they tried to make memes from photographs and songs of artists. Then flags appeared at Dora’s concerts and pro-Russian slogans sounded. The singer tried to distance herself from the new public: slogans, she emphasized, were for rallies (already virtually prohibited in Russia), and her concerts were exclusively for songs.

Dora's cut rock - as she defined her style with simple guitars, drums and melodic vocals - like the entire Russian music industry , faced the challenge of military censorship. Like many other artists, Dora decided that nothing about her lyrics would change. Dora's fans were supportive of this choice in the comments.

At the same time, the album “Lovesongs” is designed not only for Dora’s former fan base - mainly zoomers - but also for a wider audience. The singer reaches the mass Russian-speaking listener, who prefers light music about relationships.

One of the tracks on the album is called “Asti” , and it is about how Dora began to recognize herself in Anna Asti’s songs. Dora's current work is really similar in content to what Asti does: the same familiar story about a love drama. But this content is presented somewhat differently - with Dora’s signature gentle intonation (albeit fairly diluted with auto-tune). And the team of St. Petersburg producers who worked on the album offer the listener inventive RʼnʼB, reggaeton and breaks - Asti would have had a straight kick there.

Dora grows up along with her first fans - and the songs grow up accordingly. “I’ll collect myself by the morning / I’ll erase the messages / I’ll rekindle the spark / I’ll be able to love the melancholy... There’s no cure for this pain / The entrance to my heart, the door is broken,” the artist sings without further ado in the album’s opening track, “Cats on the Heart,” and analogies with Asti’s work naturally suggest themselves. Further, the intersections in the lyrics of two such different singers become even more obvious.

At the same time, Dora’s texts are simpler in a good way, without Instagram philosophy - and closer to living human language (“I’m tired of being comfortable and simple”). Asti is true to her usual pathos: in 2023, she proclaimed herself a queen and once again presented her lyrical anti-hero as a victim (“The boy swam, the boy hit”). Dora remains ironic. In “Hot Girls Club,” music lovers were hooked by the line “I have more babies than these rappers / And they will never fall for these rappers.” Such precise, but not dirty punches from an artist addressed to the predominantly male Russian rap scene are very rare.

Another important difference between artists is that one changes and the other does not. Asti, whether in the duet Artik&Asti, or during her solo career, plays the same role: a femme fatale who became fatal not because of a good life - she was deceived, forgiven, betrayed again. If you listen to Dora's albums from the last five years in a row, it is impossible not to notice the transformation.

The debut album “Younger Sister” (2019) is the same cut rock : about a boy who likes him, but sees her only as a friend, and his first disappointments. The second album, God Bless Cut Rock (2020), although a continuation of the first musically, still identified Dora as a potentially big pop auteur, ready to expand beyond the teen niche. “Autumn is drunk, winter is sober, spring is my minor” - almost a romance, you can sing it with a guitar by the fire or in the kitchen.

The next record “Miss” (2022), with an instrumental of beats and rattles, established Dora as an R&B artist who sings not only about a broken heart, but also about her own popularity, separation, fear of loneliness, and can also riff on the topic of money - they say , is ready to buy her chosen one everything he wants. Well, what, tell me, is not a classic set of a rap artist?

Direct competition between Anna Asti and Dora is definitely not expected yet - especially since Dora dedicated a song to her on the new album. She refers to Asti’s track “Girl Dance” : in its heroine the singer now recognizes herself (“I look at her as if in a mirror, and she too / At me too”). In her Telegram channel, Dora admitted that she recorded this track the first time: “It was a uniquely honest and sincere reading.”

Until recently, having encountered such an unexpected reference, one could at most think about how quickly time flies, and remember the group “Vintage”, which dedicated the track to Eva Polna. Today, seeing the names of Dora and Asti side by side, it is difficult not to think that they are united not only and not so much by music.

First of all, denunciations were written against both artists, and both had their concerts cancelled. At Asti, however, not because of anti-war posts, but because of the “naked party”, in which the Russian authorities saw a reason for repression. Asti, a native of the Ukrainian city of Cherkassy, ​​returned to the stage four months later, performing at a pro-government concert.

Another parallel between the singers is that both prefer not to notice Russian reality, at least not to discuss it publicly. On the album's closing track, "Forgive Yourself," Dora sings, "My life won't tell me no again." A contradictory statement, given that in the spring and summer of 2024, Dora’s concerts in her native Saratov were againbanned following denunciations from pro-war activists.

The difference between “Lovesongs” and today’s work of the Ukrainian Zhanulka , also a cue singer and a star of Russian-language tik-tok, is noteworthy: the artists’ backgrounds are similar, which cannot be said about their reactions to historical upheavals. Zhanulka sings about the loss of her home and tries to reflect on life during the war. The matured Dora and her now multi-age audience are trying to hide in fairy tales - while in real Russia, even six-year-olds are entitled to “Talks about important things.”

Alexander Shakirov