Boris Grebenshikov

Leningrad, 1972: a theatrical venture that turned into a band

Boris Grebenshikov was born in Leningrad on 27 November 1953. In 1972, with his childhood friend Anatoly "George" Gunitsky, he started Aquarium — not as a rock group but as a postmodern theatrical project that mixed poetry with music. For most of its first decade it had no label, no venue and no official existence: the Soviet concert system had no category for it, so the music circulated on self-copied reel and cassette tape.

The cost of that position became plain in 1980, when Grebenshikov played the Tbilisi rock festival. A KGB report on the performance followed, and he lost both his job and his Komsomol membership. The band kept working through flats, institute halls and the unofficial club circuit for the rest of the decade.

Out through the West, back to the East

Aquarium's first release outside the Soviet Union came in 1986 on the compilation Red Wave. Three years later Grebenshikov made Radio Silence, an English-language album produced by Dave Stewart, which reached number seven on the US Modern Rock chart — a brief window in which a Leningrad songwriter was handled as an international signing.

The window shut. Aquarium dissolved in 1991, and Grebenshikov spent the following years rebuilding under his own name and then under the band's again, writing in Russian for a Russian audience rather than chasing the Anglophone market a second time.

The records that carry the weight

The catalogue's centre of gravity sits in the 1980s and 1990s. Sinii Albom (The Blue Album) and Treugolnik both appeared in 1981, Radio Africa in 1983, Den' Serebra in 1984 and Ravnodenstvie in 1987 — records that moved between reggae, folk and art rock without settling, and whose lyrics worked by allegory rather than statement. Russkii Albom followed in 1992, credited to BG-Band in the gap after the group's first break-up, then Navigator in 1995 and Hyperborea in 1997.

The last full-length before the current one was Dom Vseh Svyatyh (House of All Saints), the twenty-fourth numbered Aquarium album: fifteen songs across fifty-five minutes, released on 16 September 2022 after an IndieGoGo campaign in August that year paid for the final mastering. Grebenshikov also holds the Russian state Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", fourth class, awarded in an earlier era of his standing at home.

A name withdrawn, a name returned

After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Grebenshikov stopped performing under the Aquarium name — exactly fifty years into its concert history — and worked instead as BG+, a band with its own line-up and sound. He left Russia and settled in London.

The Russian state responded in stages. In mid-June 2023 he was fined 50,000 roubles for discrediting the armed forces; on 30 June 2023 the Ministry of Justice entered him in the foreign agents register. In October 2025 an administrative case over an unlabelled YouTube video brought a further 40,000-rouble fine. On 16 March 2026 a Companies House filing for his UK partnership BG PLUS LLP recorded that he and his wife Irina had become British citizens, a change first reported on 25 March 2026.

He does not accept the emigrant framing. Speaking to Bereg on 24 January 2026 he said his Russia travels with him, and described London chiefly as a technical upgrade: better studios, and musicians within reach. On the attacks that come his way from Moscow he told Meduza he had no wish to judge anyone — people could consider him whatever they liked, so long as they listened to the songs.

Strange News from a Distant Star

The twenty-fifth Aquarium studio album, Strannye Novosti s Dalyokoy Zvezdy (Strange News from a Distant Star), went up on Bandcamp on 15 January 2026 and reached the remaining platforms on 18 February. It runs ten tracks and thirty-eight minutes, written across 2024 and 2025. The BG+ name went with it: as Grebenshikov put it, the whole band felt this was an Aquarium record, so he was not going to argue. He has also said he spent no time inventing the songs — they arrived, and he managed to get the words down.

The core is Konstantin Tumanov on a wide spread of keyboards — piano, harmonium, accordion, Hammond, Wurlitzer, glockenspiel and church organ — with Alexander Titov on bass and Brian Finnegan on flute. The track Gorizont (Horizon) brings in guest voices including Andrei Makarevich, Alexander Vasiliev, Evgeny Fedorov and Seva Gakkel, the cellist from Aquarium's first decade. Spasi i Sokhrani is the other piece reviewers single out.

Writing for DTF, a reviewer described the production as transparent but saturated, like hearing music through slightly fogged glass, with folk, electronics and string arrangements marking out space rather than filling it. The same review noted that the album is in no hurry to please — it asks questions instead of answering them, and expects attention rather than assent. Most of the material had already been aired at concerts or issued in acoustic form before the studio versions appeared, so the record functions partly as a settling of songs the audience already knew.

Where it stands this autumn

The 2026 touring year opened in Britain and Ireland — Union Chapel in London on 30 March, the Button Factory in Dublin on 1 April — then ran through North America in May, including a New York date at Webster Hall, and across Europe over the summer and into September.

The remaining dates are dense and spread wide: Riga on 14 and 15 October, Vilnius on 17 October, Dubai on 29 October, Limassol on 1 November, Haifa on 4 November and Rishon LeZion on 5 November, Helsinki on 10 November, Tallinn on 10 December, and then Hamburg's Docks on 13 January 2027. The geography is the point. These are the cities where the Russian-speaking audience now lives, and the itinerary reads as a map of that dispersal rather than a conventional album cycle.