VÏKAE Releases ‘Doomsday Collective’
For Ukrainian-born, Aotearoa-based dark-pop artist VÏKAE, the world has already ended a few times. Doomsday Collective is the record of those endings – and the blueprint for what rose from the ruins.
This isn’t a debut album in the traditional sense. It’s an anthology, a sonic excavation of years of false starts, halted eras and creative reincarnations. The songs span pandemics, heartbreaks, discarded albums and personal resurrections: each piece salvaged from a different timeline. It’s the wreckage of a career that refused to die and a collage of music that once didn’t belong anywhere, now re-contextualised as a single body of work.
“It’s not a concept album,” says VÏKAE. “It’s the aftermath of every concept that fell apart. These songs were never meant to coexist – but maybe that’s the point.”
Doomsday Collective – 21 November 2025
The first wave of Doomsday Collective gathers eleven tracks written between 2019 and 2025 – a six year long emotional chronicle disguised as apocalypse pop.
The bilingual opener Swipe Right reclaims modern dating as protest: attachment stemming from boredom and a craving for connection. Pandora’s Box spits acid at late-capitalist dependence, as well as the hypocrisy in the business side of the medical system (“system keeps us sick so we depend on it”). Death Eater transforms manipulation tactics from a shitty boss and their occult toxicity into catharsis. Ti Moi Okean blurs love and drowning in a world devoid of human connection; Bad Lovers aches with unspoken queer desire. As the collection deepens, so does the darkness: Flick A Switch, Rust, Stuck Inside, and Eat The Rich dissect control and burnout. Hyde & Seek uses the 1886 gothic horror ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ as the basis of the storyline. The instruments sampled from old WW1 machinery, whilst the closing track Operator (music video to come) captures the desperate poetry of calling for help and hearing only static, where she called crisis and they put her on hold.
Every element is sharpened by long-time collaborator and friend Abigail Knudson, whose production sculpts thematic chaos into theatre. Mastering across the years comes from Rich Bryan, Dan Martin, and Chris Chetland, preserving each era’s unique sonic fingerprint. Visual direction and artwork for the original tracklisting were created by Chontalle Musson, whose dystopian photography and design complete the album’s cinematic universe.
Doomsday Collective (Deluxe) – 5 December 2025
Two weeks later, the Deluxe Edition arrives – a second detonation introducing three new works that expand the mythos and reframe the narrative:
– Frequency – Produced by Dick Johnson and mastered by Klaus Heavyweight Hill; dance-floor catharsis as spiritual revival.
– Angry Girl (DDay Edition) – A re-engineered, razor-edged update of VÏKAE’s cult single which has been reclaimed with retribution.
– БІЖІТЬ, ВИХОДЬТЕ (you have a fetish for the apocalypse) – Half Ukrainian, half English and all fire; “bombs and lipstick, deadly kisses, have you got a death wish, (you have a fetish for the apocalypse).”
These new tracks act like recovered transmissions and messages from beyond the first collapse, solidifying Doomsday Collective as both historical documentation of her work and somehow simultaneously a living organism.
Photo Credit: Chontalle Musson
