4Szmery

Bochnia, autumn 1996

4 Szmery formed in Bochnia, a small town east of Kraków, in the autumn of 1996. By the band's own account on its website, the first incarnation played original material shaped by an obsession with AC/DC, then came apart. What reassembled in 1998 was something narrower and more commercially durable: a full-blooded AC/DC covers band, which is the founding date most Polish promoters still print.

The reassembly brought a rule that has defined the group ever since. There is no schoolboy cap, no shorts, no Angus Young impersonation. Promoter copy for the current club shows makes the point explicitly — the band rejected costumes and concentrated on the music — and it is the first thing listings mention, ahead of any biographical detail. The second thing is volume. The band's own site reduces its manifesto to five words in capitals: it plays loud, really loud.

The line-up that carried the group through its tribute decades is Robert "Sierściu" Mastalerz on vocals, Andrzej Tabor on drums, Grzegorz "Gabi" Gruca on bass and Arkadiusz Kluczewski on guitar, with the second guitar chair listed variously as Jacek Szwed on ticket-agency pages and Piotr Solnica in the band's 2024 album announcement, where Szwed appears instead as a backing vocalist.

A long apprenticeship in someone else's songs

The tribute work was not a novelty turn but a trade, played across the whole AC/DC catalogue rather than the radio handful. Mastalerz's selling point, repeated in venue copy, is that he covers both eras — the Bon Scott records of the 1970s and the Brian Johnson years that followed — which is what allows the band to programme 1976 material and 2008 material in the same hour without the set falling into two halves.

How much of Poland they covered doing it depends on who is counting. The band's own website claims more than a thousand concerts across more than twenty-five years. Booking agency copy and the Cavatina Hall listing for 2026 both put the figure above two thousand; the GoOut profile says over eight hundred. The gap is the ordinary inflation of promotional material rather than a dispute about anything real, and the band's own number is the conservative one.

That volume of work produced a specific kind of reputation. Polish listings describe the group as the best AC/DC tribute in Europe, which is a promoter's claim rather than a measurable one, but the audience evidence is more concrete: the aggregated ticket-shop rating for the band's Tribute to AC/DC shows sits at 4.98 out of five across 46 reviews, with the earliest of those dating to a Gdynia show in September 2018 and the most recent to Toruń in September 2024.

The Spodek, 19 February 2023

The twenty-fifth anniversary was marked on 19 February 2023 at the Spodek in Katowice, the saucer-shaped arena that is the largest room a Polish rock band of this standing can plausibly attempt. The show was staged by Agencja Artystyczna VOICES and announced the previous December, built around four guest vocalists from the Polish rock establishment: Małgorzata Ostrowska, Marek Piekarczyk, Piotr Cugowski and Krzysztof Sokołowski of Nocny Kochanek.

The logged setlist runs to 27 songs across two hours and 35 minutes, from a 6.50pm start to a 9.25pm finish. It opened with "Rock 'n' Roll Train" and "Rock or Bust" and closed the main set with "Let There Be Rock", with "Highway to Hell" and "For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)" as the encore. Piekarczyk took "Girls Got Rhythm" and "Shot Down in Flames", Cugowski sang "T.N.T." and "Ride On", and Ostrowska handled "Whole Lotta Rosie" and "You Shook Me All Night Long".

Three songs in that set were not AC/DC's. "Roll", "Ślad" and "Profil" are the band's own, dropped into an arena programme of covers at positions seven, sixteen and twenty-one — far enough apart that no stretch of the night belonged entirely to the original material, which is a fair description of where the group stood at that point.

Roll, then 2_4

The first album of original songs, Roll, arrived in 2019 after roughly two decades of covers. It holds ten tracks, among them "Profil", "Ja", "Roll", "Ślad" and "Czekolada", and keeps the hard rock frame the band had spent those decades inside rather than attempting an escape from it.

The second, 2_4, was released on 24 September 2024, five years after the debut. It is also ten songs, described by the band as rock but melodic, with lyrics by Mastalerz dealing in ordinary life stories, and musical production by Kluczewski. The recording credits list Mastalerz on vocals, Kluczewski on guitars and backing vocals, Tabor on drums, Gruca on bass, Szwed on backing vocals and Barbara Furmańska on backing vocals for the track "My". The first single, "Mamy To", went up on YouTube in May 2024.

The framing around the release was unusually direct about the problem the band had created for itself. Its own album notes say the group has changed the image that tied it exclusively to AC/DC's music, without disowning the inspirations it started with. The follow-through was a promotional run through small halls rather than arenas: on 30 January 2025 the band played the large cinema room at Kino Regis in its home town of Bochnia, leading with material from 2_4 including "Mamy To" and keeping the AC/DC interpretations in reserve as the part of the night the audience had already paid for before.

The two identities now sell separately. Tickets go on sale either for "4 Szmery" — the album shows — or for "Tribute to AC/DC – 4 Szmery", and the second billing is still doing most of the trade.

Where things stand in October 2026

The current touring pattern is a handful of well-spaced club and theatre dates rather than a continuous tour. On 26 June 2026 the band played the main stage at Cavatina Hall in Bielsko-Biała, a seated concert hall, at 7pm, with tickets at 89–149 złoty and a discounted rockowe silent disco afterparty attached; that show is marked sold out. The most recently logged performance before the 2026 run was Blues Club in Gdynia on 27 September 2025.

Two dates are advertised for the rest of the year. On 7 November 2026 the band appears at Klub Kwadrat in Kraków from 6pm as part of Monsters of Rock – Tribute Fest, a four-band bill shared with Polish Priest, Orgasmatron and The Legacy, with tickets from 128.90 złoty. On 10 December 2026 it headlines Lizard King in Toruń at 8pm, promoted by the venue, with tickets from 86.90 złoty — the one date currently on general sale as a headline show of its own.

Nothing new has been announced since 2_4. For a band two years past its second album and twenty-eight years past its formation, the live diary is the activity, and the tribute banner is still what fills the rooms.