New electronic Bashkir project Ay Yola goes viral on the Internet

Who is Umay?

As the official channels of the project say, Ay Yola is a musical trio that takes listeners back to the origins of the ancient Ural Batyr folk story The characters and plots are from the monument of Bashkir literature, the music is electronic with a touch of kuray, dombra, kubyz. The creators translate the name as “universal laws, charter,” “set of rules of the universe.”

Ural Batyr is an ancient epic that tells about the main character's struggle with various evil forces of nature. The song that brought Ay Yola popularity talks about Humay, aka Umay and Ymay, a pagan female deity among the Turkic peoples, the patroness of children and women in labour. And also about her father Samrau, the heavenly king of birds — Umay was born from one of his wives, the Sun.

The project announced itself in early February. At the same time, in mid-2024, the same trio presented the anthem My Ufa, and the news at the same time reported that they would soon have a certain project called Yolam. On 21 February 2025, the song Batyrwith trap rhythms appeared on music platforms, which aroused keen interest among users.

But the second single, the synthwave track Homay, released on 14 March, or rather, its reels with it, received a really big distribution on the Internet. As the authors write, they were watched by about three million people on various social media (though without specifying which one). At the same time, the project also posted it with subtitles in English, Kazakh and Russian. The last one, which was recently released on Instagram*, has almost 147,000 likes: “My roots ask, My soul and blood ask, Ancient historical memory asks: Who is Humay?”

Music critics called Homay the 2025 hit Pyyala pointing out the similarity with the hit of the duet Aigel, which gained wide popularity after the series The Word of the Boy: the language of the small peoples of Russia, female vocals, an abundance of synthesizers. It should be noted, however, that Aigel Gaysina sings about more abstract things and has no ethnic component at all. Whereas Ay Yola emphasizes the connection with cultural heritage in each post.

The project has three authors

Firstly, this is the Honoured Artist of Bashkortostan, the founder and soloist of the ethno-group Argymak Rinat Ramazanov. The group, created in 2009, does something similar to Ay Yola, mixes styles, while a significant part of their songs are drawn to rock music. In 2015, the group began working at the Bashkir Philharmonic. They toured all over Russia, visited Kazakhstan, France, Mexico, China. In 2017, Realnoe Vremya interviewed him.

And here are two more people — a father and daughter, Ruslan and Adel Shaykhitdinovs. Together they are doing Musume project (which translates from Japanese as “daughter”), performing songs in Russian and English, and released an album in both languages. In 2019, Musume performed on the show Songs on the TNT channel, but the duo has not been very active lately. Shaykhitdinov is known under the pseudonym Ruslan Sever, he collaborated with Naadya, Padilion, J-Soul, Why Berry, Splash, Thomas Mraz (with whose Ufa colleague Musume went on tour). And it is he who is primarily responsible for the music in Ay Yola. Adele, by the way, studied in Kazan, at the Institute of Social and Philosophical Sciences and Mass Communications of the Kazan Federal University and, in particular, performed at student events.

However, the social media noted the roughness of the lyrics (the musicians were scolded for not consulting with philologists) and the vocalist's pronunciation. However, such disputes only increase the number of views, so one of the commentators wittily described the typical reaction as “anger, denial, acceptance.”

Ay Yola releases the next single in early April — Ugez, which already leans towards alternative rock. This is already a story about a bull that Ural Batyr fights.

All this is part of a 12-song album for the MTS label. Their first performance will take place at Ün Music Week festival in Alma Ata in early May.