If there’s a dramatic intensity to the folk music that Yagody performs, part of that is owing to the fact Zoriana Dybovska launched this female vocal quartet’s members with colleagues from a theatre school in Lviv, in western Ukraine. But the rest of that dramatic heft they give their music stems from the hard reality that’s befallen their country during four years of Russian war and brutality. It’s not only vital to revive, celebrate and share Ukrainian traditional song, but also wield its very existence as a way to resist the invaders’ attempts to deny and blot out that cultural identity.

Accordion, drums, guitar and tsymbaly (dulcimer) drive this ensemble’s music, but the four vocalists lift it skyward. While they mostly explore traditional music – “the songs of wild tribes, the voice of your ancestors,” they like to say — their song “Tsunamia” was their beleaguered nation’s powerful entry to the 2024 Eurovision song contest. Like much of what they do, it was a crashing wave that hit hard, urgent and proud. There are few more powerful and beautiful ways to proclaim Slava Ukraini! than theirs.

- Jason Markusoff