Review
Genre and Mood
MARUV and Boosin made Drunk Groove as electronic dance pop sung in English, and it became a hit across Eastern Europe. The feelings on this page, sultry, hypnotic and provocative, are our reading; the last fits a singer whom TNT Music introduced as provocative and an image her own grandmother, she said, approved of.
Song Summary
Drunk Groove came out in December 2017 on Warner Music Russia as the lead single of MARUV’s debut album Black Water, which followed in September 2018. Anna Korsun, who performs as MARUV, wrote the lyric and Mikhail Busin, the guitarist and DJ known as Boosin, wrote the music and produced it; the single runs three minutes and forty-six seconds. Asked about its success in 2018, MARUV took the song apart herself: its harmony, she said, is in the best tradition of romances, the harmony of Slavic peoples, and its melody is pure chanson.
Musical Breakdown
No source walks through the track part by part; what follows rests on MARUV’s own account of how it is built.
Main Section
The voice carries the song. MARUV said American pop writes everything on the pentatonic scale or in the natural minor, while her melody runs in the melodic minor and off the pentatonic, which is why, in her words, Europeans hear it as fresh and listeners in Ukraine and Russia as close to the folk and Soviet songs they grew up with.
Under the melody lies the formula she summed up as a joke: take a couple of songs by the chanson singer Mikhail Shufutinsky, put them into English and lay a steady kick drum under them. Listen for how even the beat stays while the melody bends.
Concepts in Focus
Drunk Groove is a lesson in what a minor key can mean. The natural minor lowers the third, sixth and seventh notes of the major scale; the melodic minor raises the sixth and seventh again on the way up, so the melody leans harder towards its home note. MARUV heard that colour as Slavic and credited it, not the beat, with the song’s appeal.
The music video, directed by Serge Vane, appeared on her YouTube channel on 2 March 2018 and drew more than 2.5 million views in under a day; it was later nominated for Best Video at the YUNA awards. Two remix packages followed, with versions by Kolya Funk & Mephisto, Mike Tsoff & German Avny, Rocket Fun & Leo Johns, Johnny Beast, Alex Spite and Rodge.
Artistic Context
MARUV, born in Pavlohrad in 1991, started in the pop-rock band The Pringlez and turned to modern electronic pop in 2017, when she met Busin and founded the label Zori Sound with him. In 2019 she won Ukraine’s national selection for Eurovision with Siren Song, but she and the broadcaster could not agree on a contract, and Ukraine withdrew from the contest.
Impact and Reception
The single topped the TopHit airplay charts of Russia, Ukraine and the CIS, reached number eight on Polish airplay, went double platinum in Poland and won the Dance Parade award at the M1 Music Awards 2018. Listen for the melodic minor in the voice and decide whether it sounds new or familiar to you.
