JINJER

Donetsk, and a line-up that took eight years to settle

Jinjer began in Donetsk in 2008, and none of the people who started it are still involved. The band's own reckoning puts the real beginning at 2009, when vocalist Tatiana Shmayluk and guitarist Roman Ibramkhalilov joined; bassist Eugene Abdukhanov arrived in 2011. The drum stool took longest to fill. Vyacheslav Okhrimenko played until 2011, Oleksandr Koziychuk until 2013, then Yevhen Mantulin, whose tenure ended in 2014 after he was severely injured in a fall from a window. Dmitriy Kim held the seat until 2016, when Vladislav Ulasevich took over. That quartet has been unchanged for a decade.

Recognition came locally first — Best Ukrainian Metal Act in 2013, and again in 2016. The wider audience arrived through the internet rather than through radio or a label push: by September 2018 the band had registered on Billboard's Next Big Sound chart, driven largely by the traction of "Pisces", a song Metal Hammer would later place at number 74 in its ranking of the hundred greatest metal songs of the 21st century.

Five albums, each one heavier on structure than the last

The first full-length, Cloud Factory, was self-released in 2014 and preceded by two EPs — Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear in 2009 and Inhale, Do Not Breathe in 2012. King of Everything followed on 29 July 2016 and was the band's first for Napalm Records, the label they have stayed with since. It contained "Pisces", and it is the record most of the audience found them through.

Macro arrived on 25 October 2019, trailed by the Micro EP earlier that year, and Wallflowers on 27 August 2021. Across those three the writing moved steadily away from straight groove metal and towards longer, more sectional pieces, with Shmayluk moving between clean singing, mid-range shouting and low guttural work inside single songs rather than across a record.

2022, and the job that came with the passports

In March 2022, after Russia's full-scale invasion, the band paused their career and redirected their effort into Ukrainian relief work. By June 2022 they had been granted permission to tour again, travelling as official cultural ambassadors for Ukraine — a formal arrangement, not a slogan, and one that has shaped how their shows are received ever since. Shmayluk relocated to Los Angeles.

That displacement fed directly into the fifth album. Duél draws on late-19th-century Ukrainian and Eastern European history alongside Shmayluk's own dislocation and the band's unasked-for diplomatic role, which is a heavier brief than most metal records carry and accounts for the reception it got.

Duél

Duél was finished in June 2024 and released by Napalm on 7 February 2025, produced by Max Morton with the band. It runs 42 minutes and 50 seconds across a set of songs that sit between progressive metal, groove metal and metalcore without settling into any of them.

The reviews were strong rather than unanimous. Album of the Year aggregates a critic score of 75 from nine reviews. Metal Injection scored it 90 and judged that the band were "operating at the peak of their creative powers". Metal Hammer gave it 80 and called it their darkest and angriest record. Kerrang! described it as "unsparing in its intensity" and read it as a mirror of Ukraine's position. Angry Metal Guy dissented, arguing the songwriting broke no new ground. Loudwire included it among its eleven best progressive metal albums of 2025.

There is no successor in progress. Speaking to Metal Hammer, Shmayluk was blunt about why: "I confess that I haven't started writing anything yet... There are 99 problems that I have to solve right now – taxes, personal stuff. I honestly can't find the inspiration to write." In the same period, in a piece published on 12 January 2026, she pushed back at being filed under "female-fronted", noting that she had modelled her early screaming on Lamb of God's Randy Blythe and was compared only to other women: "We are still getting compared to artists that have nothing to do with us."

A year spent almost entirely on the road

The European Duél Tour opened at the Palladium in Cologne on 23 January 2026 and ran through to Grosse Freiheit 36 in Hamburg on 2 March — the first full European headline run in six years, taking in L'Olympia in Paris on 2 February, the Tonhalle in Munich on 14 February and the Astra in Berlin on 21 February, with the London date at the O2 Forum Kentish Town on 31 January. Napalm put the attendance across the run at more than 50,000, with a number of sold-out nights.

North America was announced in March 2026: 37 cities with Crystal Lake and Entheos as special guests, opening at the Bronson Centre in Ottawa on 5 June and closing on the Long Beach leg of the Vans Warped Tour on 25 July, with further festival stops at Warped in Washington DC, Inkarceration, Upheaval and Festival Au Lac. General on-sale was 20 March at 10am local. Abdukhanov framed it as "the final tour in support of the Duél album cycle, and we feel like we really saved the best for last", and separately noted it was the band's first North American headline run since 2024.

The current work is a step sideways rather than another headline lap. Announced on 23 February 2026, Jinjer are special guests to Spiritbox on the Tsunami Sea UK and EU Tour — 18 shows opening at the SEC Centre Hall 3 in Glasgow on 12 September and finishing at La Seine Musicale in Paris on 9 October, with Dying Wish opening. The UK leg took in Nottingham's Motorpoint Arena on 14 September, Co-op Live in Manchester on 16 September, the Utilita Arena in Cardiff on 17 September and the OVO Arena Wembley on 19 September. Berlin's UFO im Velodrom follows on 22 September. Beyond that, two co-headline dates with Trivium in Canada are booked for November 2026, and Wacken Open Air is on the sheet for July 2027.

What the shows have looked like

The headline set this year was long and heavily weighted to the new record. Setlist.fm's average across 28 of the 31 European dates comes to 17 songs plus a one-song encore: a taped prologue, then "Duél" — which opened all 28 shows — followed by "Green Serpent", "Fast Draw", "Vortex", "Disclosure!", "Tantrum", "Teacher, Teacher!", "Kafka", "Judgement (& Punishment)", "Hedonist", "I Speak Astronomy", "Perennial", "Someone's Daughter", "Rogue" and "Pisces", which closed the main set in 26 of 28 shows, with "Sit Stay Roll Over" as the encore in 27 of them.

Reviewing the Kentish Town show on 31 January, MetalTalk described Shmayluk performing in traditional Ukrainian dress, and a production built around imagery of conflict, authoritarianism and freedom — gavels slamming down on the screens behind her during "Judgement (& Punishment)". The same review noted touts outside a full room, and Shmayluk moving from roars to clean high registers and reggae phrasing without dropping anything in the transfer. North American headline shows over the summer averaged an hour and a quarter.

The arena slot is a different proposition. At Glasgow on 12 September the band played nine songs in fifty minutes, opening with "Perennial" and "Pit of Consciousness", then "Green Serpent", "I Speak Astronomy", "Vortex", "Someone's Daughter", "Judgement (& Punishment)", "Pisces" and "Duél" to finish. Moshville's reviewer wanted more of it, describing the band as taking no prisoners from the first bar, praising the ascending crescendos in "I Speak Astronomy" and the lowest end of Shmayluk's range in "Vortex", and arguing that "Pisces" works better as a penultimate song than a closer.