Pussy Riot have released their debut album CYKA, alongside the official music video for “CANDY DOPAMINE” featuring Avenged Sevenfold.
The release marks a major recorded statement from Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist protest art collective long known for turning music, performance, activism, and confrontation into one volatile language. With CYKA, that chaos moves into album form, giving the project a full-length platform for its mix of punk provocation, electronic abrasion, political rage, and performance-art spectacle.
“CANDY DOPAMINE” gives the album rollout one of its most immediate visual moments, pairing Pussy Riot’s confrontational world with a feature from Avenged Sevenfold. The collaboration pulls together two very different corners of heavy and alternative culture, because apparently, genre boundaries were not suffering enough already. In this case, good. Let them suffer.
The video leans into the kind of overstimulated, rebellious energy that has defined Pussy Riot’s public identity for years. Their work has never been designed to sit politely in the background. It is built to interrupt, irritate, provoke, and force attention toward the systems they are criticizing. CYKA continues that approach, pushing music and message into the same collision zone.
Alongside the album release, Nadya Tolokonnikova has also issued a public challenge to Vladimir Putin for a UFC cage match at the White House. The challenge is absurd on its face, which is almost certainly the point. Pussy Riot have always understood spectacle as a political tool, using exaggeration, humor, danger, and public confrontation to expose power structures that would rather remain untouched.
That tension between performance and protest has followed Pussy Riot since their earliest actions. Whether through music videos, courtrooms, prison sentences, museum spaces, or public interventions, the project has consistently treated visibility as a weapon. CYKA arrives as the latest extension of that mission, loud enough to function as music and sharp enough to remain a provocation.
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