//  Origin:  New York, NY

 

//  Genres:  Punk Chanson Noir

 

//  Years Active:  2011- Present

 

//  Website:  www.madmegtheband.com

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//  YouTube:  www.youtube.com/ThePopenko

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Assembled and based in New York, the eclectic and hard-rocking band, with overtones of Eastern European existential anguish, have toured extensively in Russia and the former Soviet Bloc, including tours that covered close to 30 cities throughout the vast, frozen expanse of Russia, and in the course of which they shared the stage with such luminaries as Nogu Svelo, and Emir Kusturica and recorded a live album at a female prison in Lithuania, which was released in November of 2019. The band has also released one full-length studio album, two EP’s, two singles and is about to come out with it’s brand new 7-song studio record. In 2020, amid the pandemic, Mad Meg gained recognition in Mexico, while the band’s single “Functioning Adult” is in regular rotation on Mexico's Reactor 105.7 and other radio stations.

 

The leader of Mad Meg, Russian-born poet, photographer, artist, filmmaker, lunatic Ilya Popenko, is a towering and unpalatable figure, whose morbidly fascinating performance style and zombie-like singing does nothing to elucidate the profundity, charming self-deprecating irony, and expressive subtlety of his songs, written sometimes in English, sometimes in Russian. These qualities are further obscured by the clamoring instrumental accompaniment of his assembly of sidekicks, who play in an eclectic style they themselves haphazardly identify as “Punk-Chanson-Noir”.

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