About Khadn dadn
Hadn Dadn grew out of a childhood nonsense phrase of Varvara Kraminova: in Moscow she used “hadn dadn” for anything and everything, and in 2016 it became a band name. She was born on 18 February 1994, sat at the piano from five, sang in choirs, and from six wrote tunes on homework from a cousin — always with words, otherwise it felt unfair. She is the granddaughter of bard Boris Vakhnyuk, who once took a very young Alla Pugacheva under his wing and in 2005 was killed by a car with two of his youngest daughters, Varvara’s aunts; she was eleven. Her mother, Tatyana Vakhnyuk, still lives inside the songs: on the “Portuguese Album” she told them how to “go to the end.” At thirteen Varvara invented a fake musician boyfriend for a classmate, wrote his letters, and recorded songs in a lowered voice, a mash of Dolphin and the boy-band Korni. She did not become a translator of other people’s lives: she graduated from VGIK, sang in Sozvezdie Otrezok to rest her soul, and treated Hadn Dadn as a place to be “a warrior.”
The first public night was a friend’s birthday. She was too shy to sing alone at the piano; Nikita Chernat covered her on guitar, and that same evening the Latin spelling Hadn Dadn appeared. Early tracks were taped in a stairwell; “Podozhdi” was a homemade clip, she wrote most of the words, friends built the arrangements. Anton Moiseenko, then her boyfriend and producer, coined the genre “lyaoakyn” — swagger, folk color, knowing the world through private feeling — and traveled with her from the Caucasus to Nakhichevan, where “Secret Album” and songs like “Armians v Nakhichevani” were born. Then came “Postepenny,” “Podruzhki,” “Lyaoakyn,” and a 2018 Young Blood prize. “My segodnya doma,” from the secret record, became the unofficial anthem of sitting at home in 2020; they sang “Khramomama” on Evening Urgant. This is not glossy chart pop and not some other Moscow indie logo: household absurdity, pity for objects, and stacked voices they still call lyaoakyn.
The lineup kept shifting: bass passed from Anatoly Yatskov to Sergei Kakurkin; guitarist Leonid Minin was out for a long time with an injured hand and returned for “Ezhen.” Moiseenko left the standing circle, though his hooks still surface on the Portuguese record. They work in the village of Klementyevo, where Kakurkin has a studio; they argue until everyone turns hedgehog, quit smoking together during Lent while making “Nostalgia,” and nearly broke the band — after that, Varvara calls the last shot. Alongside came “Pereobuvayus,” “Shchepki,” “Potseluychik solnyshka,” and the single “Pod tenyu, pod sirenyu.” Do not mix this with Sozvezdie Otrezok: there she rests, here she writes almost everything and holds the sound. On the cards there is one Moscow group with this nursery name; there is no lookalike “Hadn.”
For the tenth year the album “Ezhen” split in two. Part one landed on 22 May 2026 with “Pochki v agonii,” “Ploskaya golova” and “Styd” — spring, a broken heart, a trip to Cherepovets with a friend past ruined churches and worms after rain. On 11 September 2026 came the autumn second half: love, jealousy, an attempt to flee the “fated boy,” the “scent of the year” made of things that should not fit. Onstage they pull in Olya Fokina, Liza Golitsyna, Polina Ryzhenko; October shows are set for St Petersburg and Moscow. Kraminova is still the woman in a Pavlovo Posad shawl, laughing at the chthonic Russian hinterland and finishing verses she started at nineteen. Listening to Hadn Dadn is not a hit parade but someone else’s diary that turned out to be shared: home, a church, lilac, and a glory that in childhood was just a silly word.
Comments