Everyone’s got a dark side. Viktoria Leléka has several.
Like all great artists, to understand her means being willing to put puzzle pieces together. Often, those pieces don’t seem to fit. How can a girl who doesn’t grow up with music around the house embrace it so fully? How can a woman who, in her own words, can come across “like a princess…like an angel” but also have an artistic project so dark, raw and in-your-face on the side?
And how can a Ukrainian artist represent everyone in her country, while somehow fitting the perceptions and expectations everyone else has of her? These contradictions are what make Leléka the artist such an enigma. They are also what make her complete.
I’m not sure exactly which side I’ll get. It’s a Monday afternoon, with both of us fresh off a trip to Amsterdam for Eurovision in Concert. Leléka joins me still in the Netherlands, with her onward travel to London to follow tomorrow – a keen reminder that, when you are the Ukrainian Eurovision act, it’s far harder to get R&R back home.
When we connect, she is ready to meet my expectations. Her hair and make-up are prepared, and she’s as smiley and chatty as we’d want a Song Contest contender to be. I’m ready to see if I can learn more about the person behind the art.
I Want to Play and Sing Everything
Leléka was born in Shakhtarske, in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in southeastern Ukraine: a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a few months before the fall of the USSR. Today, the region is almost on the frontline of the war in her country, a few miles north of the key battleground of Zaporizhzhia. Hers was a humble childhood:
“I’m not so old, but I grew up without [the] internet…it already existed, but not in my house”.
After a horrible, tuneless attempt at recreating the sound of dial-up for viewers who will only think I’m insane, we get into what that childhood was like. Growing up, Leléka says her household wasn’t very musical – it wasn’t banned or anything like that, but it wasn’t something her parents directly encouraged.
“I grew up with some CDs…and we had some classical music in [the] house and a little bit of Madonna and some other stuff I can’t remember…but not so much music.”
“I would say I grew up in an atmosphere with very small amount of music. I was in a very special bubble.”
Instead, she found her connection to music through a small television set in the living room – just like many of us found our connection to Eurovision.
“[I was] so quiet because I was listening to a very old Ukrainian song, and the singer Nina Matvienko is a big inspiration for me. And I heard just her voice, and I was like, wow, is this an angel?”
It was when her mother discovered a book about jazz music, though, and a particular phrase, that the course of Leléka’s life changed forever:
“My mum read a magazine where she found a phrase, if you can play jazz, you can play everything. And I was like…”
She starts joyfully laughing.
“I want to know what jazz is! And I couldn’t learn jazz in my small town. So I grew up with this…idea of somewhere in this world [there] is something like jazz and I want to discover it and I want to learn it because I want to play and sing everything. I want to be able to do everything in music.”
“Sometimes I Want to Dance Just Because I Want to Dance”
The Contest is, above all else, pop music’s domain. The show’s current director, Martin Green, has described the Eurovision Song Contest as a competition for pop music. But if pop brings order, balance and familiarity, the world of jazz attacks it in syncopated 7/4 punches. It’s a place with even fewer rules than Windows95Man had two years ago when he represented Finland.
I ask Leléka whether it was more important to learn those rules or break them. Instead, she says the most important thing she discovered was how to find her originality:
“[The biggest question is] ‘what do you like?’ I think this is one of the most complicated questions because you can learn all the rules or how to break them but the most important thing [is] what and why do you like [something] and do you really like that and, if yes, then why exactly? That’s really difficult to find and to achieve.”
She embraced the genre, and the genre embraced her back. Leléka’s adolescence was a montage of achievements and awards, as she found her sound in real-time. After earning a bachelor’s degree in performing arts, another key touchstone for her, she added a second degree in jazz vocals in Dresden, an East German town infamously hollowed out by RAF bombs in the Second World War.
Viktoria became Leléka for the first time in Berlin in 2016, forming a band with Jakob Hegner, Thomas Kolarczyk and Robert Wienröder. This group, which took her surname as its own much like she would as a solo artist ten years later, took a universally accepted jazz sound and added Ukrainian folklore and language. Light, expressive and mostly acoustic, this was the project that honed Leléka’s craft – and won accolades from those who preferred their jazz to be ‘real jazz’.
She stayed on to complete a Masters in composition, and spent her twenty-somethings winning prizes, including a scholarship for the International Vocal Jazz Camp of the New York Voices. But for Leléka, the free world of jazz did have some limits – especially from those teaching her:
“In the jazz scene, often I felt like…for example, now I’m playing a song and I really want to dance to it. But if I’m a real serious musician doing serious art, somehow people think [that] if I start to dance while singing in a jazz scene it might mean that my music isn’t enough to be an art.”
“I’m trying to do a show to show that I also can dance and try to impress people with that.”
It’s at this point, sitting there listening to Leléka describe that lack of inhibition, that I see someone who creates without compromise.
Artists spend their whole lives trying to jump through the boxes – whether it’s the woman who is pushed into pop music and high-octane choreography by a risk-averse label, or the big-time rapper who wants to put out an acoustic album. Often, those boxes define what we can do – and frame the reaction to how we can do it.
“And I felt like…in a box, because sometimes I want to dance just because I want to dance. And if I have this feeling in me, I want to be free or have enough space to express everything I want in music.”
But Leléka doesn’t create another box. She creates another identity.
“And that’s why for me, DONBASGRL was like, wow – completely another scene.”
“ANGRY UKRAINIAN GIRL EMPOWERMENT”
DONBASGRL is nothing like the Leléka Eurovision fans have got to know. An alternative project she launched in 2024, the woman Viktoria becomes is unrestrained, unrestricted, and completely raw. She’s released two songs as DONBASGRL on YouTube, ‘Zbroya’ and ‘Zhyva’, and both combine an industrial, heavy-hitting sound with art-pop sensibilities – think SOPHIE if she’d ever spent six months in a rage room.
“[For the] last seven, eight years I was dreaming about creating DONBASGRL as an alter ego project where I can be like…not beautiful, not correct, sometimes aggressive, playful, not thinking how people see me, just expressing everything I have in me.”
She describes it herself, on the project’s YouTube channel, as ANGRY UKRAINIAN GIRL EMPOWERMENT – ALL CAPS. Looking at her as she speaks softly to me about it, it’s hard to imagine the angry Ukrainian girl who lies underneath. But when you hear her, you realise she could only come from within her.
This side of her doesn’t care about anyone’s expectations:
“Being a woman and being a good girl, I always was like…the best girl in the town who studies well, has good grades and, you know: I’m so tired of that.”
“DONBASGRL [is] really helping me to be what I am, to accept what I am.”
But while the sound of DONBASGRL feels worlds apart from ‘Ridnym’, Leléka’s Eurovision 2026 entry, the roots are the same:
“Both projects are about what I feel. Yeah. And I think ‘Ridnym’ is the first try for me to really combine this, to try to accept not separately this side of me and this side of me, but yeah, trying to [merge the two].”
No matter which persona she takes, Leléka is using her art to confront her doubts. Those doubts are often personal and intimate, but set against the intense backdrop of a world around her that refuses to settle.
Her mental health journey has been a consistent tussle, and while she has a light side and a dark side, both are designed to tackle her fears head-on:
”[I want] to break all these things and to show something else, not so beautiful or not so kind, or just real fear or real anger and doubts.”
“I Want to Show that Impossible is Possible”
I’d go as far as to say it is inspirational to watch Leléka in full command of her craft. Across her work, the other consistent through-line is that she is absolutely magnetic. As DONBASGRL, she commands your attention with a short, sharp delivery – a voice always on the offensive, pushing into you. As Leléka, as the voice we’ll hear at the Eurovision Song Contest, she expertly changes that approach. Her voice is more soft and more resonant, pulling you into her.
In ‘Ridnym’, there is an obvious moment where that voice takes over every one of your senses. Towards the end of the song, Leléka begins to sing a powerful, crystalline high note – and just keeps going. And keeps going. And still. You could grab a watch from your pocket, strap it around your wrist, adjust the hands with delicate precision to the exact time, and Leléka wouldn’t just be carrying on – she’ll have taken the note even higher.
“I want to show that impossible is possible. That’s why I have this long note in my song – not just because I can sing for so long without breathing!”
It’s a note that, when she performs it at Eurovision, will immediately take the record of the longest note in the history of the Contest. Longtime fans may mourn for Natalia Gordienko, whose record will be lost to history, but I think this is a far more worthy winner of that title. When I watched her perform it at Eurovision in Concert, the pre-party in Amsterdam that Leléka and 26 other countries’ acts performed their entries live at, it was the single most affecting moment of my evening.
As the Dutch say, I had ‘chicken skin’ – goosebumps. And Leléka insists that she isn’t just singing the note to prove she can. Like almost everything to do with her, there is deep thought and meaning behind it:
“It’s not because I want to do something that nobody did before. No, it was born of this idea that if you decide to try, if you give yourself a chance, then from this decision, the new reality can grow and it can become even brighter, even taller than we ever could imagine.”
“Hope is a Good Option to Have”
So what’s behind her? That would be Ukraine. In so many ways. Last year, Leléka decided to apply for Vidbir – the Ukrainian national selection process for the Eurovision Song Contest. To earn the honour of representing her country, she had to win the Vidbir national final. I asked Leléka why, after so many years of success without it, she felt like it was the right time for her to enter:
“I felt like, wow…this should be the song I will bring to Eurovision because I believe this song can give hope to all people that could need it.”
And I think in our dark times, hope is a good option to have.”
Vidbir is a TV show with such importance and significance to Ukrainians that they still produce it amidst drone attacks and air raid sirens going on around them. Rather than pack it up, they packed it under the ground, in a secret location. In this country, Eurovision is a maximum security operation.
It can also create maximum emotion. In 2022, mere weeks after Russia’s tanks had entered Ukrainian soil, Kalush Orchestra went to the Eurovision Song Contest in Turin on special dispensation from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. What they gave back to Ukraine was worth its weight in gold – a landslide victory, driven by the largest public vote score the Contest has ever seen, and perhaps ever will see.
Their commentator on TV, the legendary Timur Miroshnychenko, cried that day. Many others did.
That symbolic significance, of Ukraine showcasing their culture and enjoying consistent success on the Eurovision stage, is not lost on Leléka. For her, being the entry is a huge responsibility she doesn’t take lightly:
“I really want to bring my people these feelings and this light to be proud of our own culture, of the music we can create. Yes, I feel a big, big responsibility because it’s not about representing myself as an artist, it’s about representing the whole country, being the voice of my people, showing the beauty of our culture.”
“It’s heavy.”
“I Want to Show…the Acceptable Amount”
To represent her country, though, is one part of another puzzle – being a Eurovision Song Contest contender. Much like the tussle between the light and dark in ‘Ridnym’, competing at Eurovision is a tightrope walk between your vision for your art and the public’s perception of it. Ukrainians truly, deeply know what it’s like to live in the shadow of war. For nearly every other competing country, their knowledge of Ukraine can only be learned. Leléka is keenly aware of that truth:
“This is for me a very difficult question of balance, because I don’t want to destroy everything, but [I want to] show a little bit of the acceptable amount of how terrible sometimes it feels what we are going through.”
People care deeply about the war: but sometimes, they just don’t want to see it.
Getting more animated as we keep talking, Leléka asserts that this challenge – communicating her daily struggle against a brutal situation while not confronting a European audience too much – is huge:
“Somehow I want to do [a] mix of [being] sincere, but in the way that…it’s not making people [say] ‘I want to take a distance from this. I don’t want to watch this’. Very difficult, very difficult.”
To walk that tightrope, Leléka has created ‘Ridnym’ to combine her two personas for the first time. For her, the song is equal parts the bright, optimistic woman who wants you to hear her sing, and the dark, aggressive woman who wants you to hear her roar. For Viktoria, this isn’t an uneasy fit, though: it’s meeting in the middle. She’s solving her own puzzle.
“I wanted to combine both sides of me, like this darkness and this lightfulness, and for me it was important because the song is about this inner transformation. [It’s] about this fear when you are at this moment where you feel like it doesn’t make any sense to continue to live or to create.”
“But still, somehow you find this something very small, but this is enough to start to grow up and to decide to live and to continue to create despite everything.”
“I Could Be a Very Uncomfortable Witch”
Just because the two sides work together doesn’t mean the song is in perfect harmony. In fact, Leléka finds that balance by creating contrast, sliding almost instantly from the sound of a fairytale into something much, much darker.
As part of the research and data that goes into The Model, our Eurovision Song Contest prediction tool, we analyse the sonic qualities of each entry to try and decipher how each one will be received by the audience in May. One of the data points we record is ‘valence’, which is a measure of how happy a song is, on a scale from 0 to 1. ‘Ridnym’, in its darker sections, comes in at 0.08. That number is the lowest, and therefore unhappiest, for a Eurovision entry we have on record.
For Leléka, though, and for me after she explains it with such conviction, it makes perfect sense for the song to shift so wildly. She calls out herself that some sections make her sound like a Disney princess, in her words – but that she knows she isn’t:
“When I did…this orchestral sound, a lot of people [were] saying like, oh, Disney! She is a princess, she is an angel, she’s bringing us light, Ukraine for peace and everything.”
“But I’m not a princess. And actually I could be a very uncomfortable witch.”
As we begin to wrap up our chat, I start to reflect on all the sides of Leléka we’ve explored. Whether it’s a young girl who refused to follow the rules then, or a strong woman following her artistic ambitions in whatever persona she takes now, she is equal parts compelling and confusing.
She is a puzzle that, as you think deeper about each piece and how they might possibly combine into one whole, only seems to get more challenging. But, on ‘Ridnym’, where the puzzle fits together, you realise that the artist Leléka is can be found in the gaps between the pieces. Those little pockets of air, of seemingly nothing – they’re everything.
When Leléka performs ‘Ridnym’ at Eurovision 2026 in Vienna, we’ll find out what side the public is on. I have a feeling they’ll fall in love with all of her.