A three-year-old girl steps onto a stage in Kyiv, and the band behind her is led by her own father. That girl was Julia Sanina, born on 11 October 1990 into a family of musicians, and she has not really left the stage since. She sang in children's show groups and a jazz big band as a kid, and by 2005 she had finished a music school for jazz and pop mastery. But the path from child performer to frontwoman of The Hardkiss, the Ukrainian alternative rock band she now leads, was not a straight line.
From philology to Sister Siren
Her real name is Julia Alexandrovna Holovan, and she took the surname Sanina when she married Valeriy Bebko. Before that, she studied at the Institute of Philology of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, and in 2013 she earned a master's degree in folklore studies. During her studies she was drawn to journalism, and from 2006 to 2008 she sang with a band called Sister Siren. None of this yet pointed to the sound that would make her famous.
The turn came in September 2011, when Sanina and Bebko created a pop duo called Val & Sanina. They sang in Russian and recorded a song called "Любовь настала" with words by Robert Rozhdestvensky and music by Raimonds Pauls. It was a polished, conventional start. Then, almost immediately, the duo changed its name to The Hardkiss and changed its image. The group switched to English and made the sound heavier.
That decision was a gamble. A Ukrainian act singing in English and pushing toward alternative rock was not an obvious commercial bet in 2011. But Sanina and Bebko wrote the music and lyrics themselves, and they moved fast. In the autumn of that year the group released its debut video for the song "Babylon". By the end of October, The Hardkiss were opening for the British band Hurts.
Sony BMG and a growing audience
The momentum kept building. Before the end of 2011, the video for "Dance with me" went into rotation on Ukrainian music channels. A few months later, in February 2012, the group signed a contract with the label Sony BMG. The Hardkiss quickly gained popularity and collected awards in Ukraine and abroad. The duo that had started with a Russian-language pop song had become something else entirely.
What made the change stick was not just the heavier sound or the English lyrics. Sanina had spent years training as a singer, from that first performance with her father's ensemble to jazz and pop school. She also brought a folklorist's ear to the band's music, even if the songs were written for electric guitars. Her stage presence, sharp and theatrical, matched the new image the group was building.
She also brought a folklorist's ear to the band's music, even if the songs were written for electric guitars.
The Hardkiss became the centre of her life, and the partnership with Bebko stayed at the core of it. They married in 2011 in a Ukrainian authentic style, the same year the band was born. Their relationship had begun when Sanina interviewed Bebko as a journalist, and they kept it secret for years. By the time the band was headlining its own shows, the woman who once sang in a pop duo was now the voice of one of Ukraine's most visible rock acts.
Thirty-six years after her birth in Kyiv, Julia Sanina is still the frontwoman of The Hardkiss. The band writes its own songs, plays alternative rock, and has outlasted the pop project that preceded it by more than a decade. The girl who first sang at three, backed by her father's ensemble, now stands in front of a much louder band. The Hardkiss is the result of that one sharp turn in 2011, and Sanina has never looked back.