Lao Che and associates

Poland's music scene seems to be in rather good health, despite sales figures that are now pretty meagre (selling thirty thousand copies is considered a success these days, and topping a hundred thousand happens maybe once a year). Three factors help offset the market's collapse.

First, the uneven distribution of the decline between mainstream and underground artists. Big names have been hit hard by the crisis, and their sales are now just a fraction of what they would have been even in the immediate post-2000 years. Alternative musicians, on the other hand, have felt the impact far less and continue to sell numbers not too far off from those of fifteen years ago.

This has led to an ever more solid presence for them in the sales charts, which they now occupy on a regular basis. It's not at all rare to reach the paradoxical point where little-known artists outsell artists who are on everyone's lips (a category now largely occupied by rappers).

Second, the regenerative power of the third channel of national radio, which broadcasts exclusively alternative music and only makes exceptions for the mainstream when deemed to be of quality. It's a historic channel, a cornerstone of Polish culture that since the early Eighties has taken on the role of stronghold for music with artistic ambitions, and it is handling the internet and social media era remarkably well.

Its new interactive guise has allowed it to keep attracting the interest of that minority of young people who don't see themselves reflected in the hip hop invasion.

To grasp the significance of this feat, ask yourself a simple question: could you imagine Radio Rai 3 with an audience that includes teenagers too?

Third, the ever more impressive live scene. It's no coincidence that Poland is now home to some of the best and most lucrative alternative music festivals in the world.

Instructions for use

This guide is an introduction to the best of Polish pop-rock from 2010 to today. Excluded are rap (the scene is vast, and from the outside it's genuinely hard to get a real-time grasp of it), experimental electronic music (drones, hums and assorted noises, since it has little local impact and is indistinguishable from that made anywhere else), and metal (a scene that already enjoys decent recognition worldwide and therefore doesn't need unveiling).

This is certainly music that demands repeated listens. Polish can sound harsh if you're not used to it, as can any language, but once your ear adjusts, you discover it's surprisingly musical - tough as German when it needs to be, soft as Portuguese when it wants to be.

The intent of this article is also to serve as a starting point rather than a final word, so there's no pretense of being exhaustive here, and at the risk of stating the obvious, the selection is strictly bound to the author's own taste. That's led to the exclusion of names a Pole would probably mention first, but as they say, nobody's perfect.

We start in 2015 and work backwards. For now there are ten albums, but there will probably be a second installment.

Lao Che: "Dzieciom" (2015)

Led by singer Hubert Dobaczewski, known as Spięty, Lao Che have been wowing Polish audiences since 2002, proving capable of holding on to their own identity while handling the most disparate styles. Given the importance of their output and their strong audience following, they arguably represent the biggest musical entity Poland has produced since 2000. This new album, an unexpected arrival after "Soundtrack" - which for the first time raised the specter of repetition - is eclectic even by their standards.

The tracks feature instrumental whirlpools that shift gears several times mid-stride, refined textures made of lounge-music fragments that flesh out funk syncopations, synths that jerk along over jazzy rhythms, furious guitars running alongside double basses and vibraphones, breathless accordions dancing with indecipherable samples, Middle Eastern melodies underscoring theatrical declamations inherited from the prestigious tradition of poezja śpiewana (sung poetry) - one moment a step away from rap, the next conjuring the ghost of a crooner lost somewhere between the qasbah and the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw.

Don't dwell on the second track, "Tu", a fairly bland slice of Balkan rock and the record's one weak spot, and instead enjoy the jagged, Arabic-tinged progressions of "Dżin", the guitar and organ saturation of the mutant ethno-jazz of "Z kamerą wśród zwierząt buszujących w sieci", the caressing flow of "Bajka o Misiu (tom pierwszy)", the furious, shaken-up guitars that pop up two minutes into "A chciałem o sobie", and above all the minimalist synth-funk masterpiece "Wojenka", which turns a children's poem by Danuta Wawiłow into an anguished anti-war anthem.

As this article goes online, "Dzieciom" has been sitting in the Polish charts for 36 weeks running. But what matters most is that you're unlikely to hear anything else quite like it in 2015.

Dawid Podsiadło: “Annoyance And Disappointment” (2015)

Podsiadło won the Polish edition of X-Factor in 2012, which should have made him Poland's answer to Marco Mengoni. Instead, no! And that's exactly what reveals the health of the scene: it allowed the winner of the country's most-watched talent show to record an indie-pop album true to his own tastes and ambitions, paired with a top-tier producer like Bogdan Kondracki. The result of those sessions was "Comfort And Happiness" (2013), which sold two hundred thousand copies - more than any other Polish record from its release date to today. And when an album finds success without making easy concessions to mainstream sound, that's always good news for music.

The just-released "Annoyance And Disappointment" shows even more personality, though. Listening to the debut invited a number of comparisons, which we'll skip over so as not to undersell the talent at hand, but this time around you get the sense of an artist fully convinced of his own abilities.

Only three of the thirteen tracks are in Polish, which is a shame, because when he sings in his own language the results are always thrilling. Still, there's little to complain about, since his English pronunciation is convincing and the songs are there, taking the form of an exquisite alternative pop, colored by vintage keyboards (the Hammond organ above all), acoustic instruments, jazzy electric guitars, occasional psychedelic fuzz, and above all his dazzling voice, streaked with soul yet unmistakably white.

From the Motown-inflected mutation of "W dobrą stronę" to the galloping "Son Of Analog", by way of the chaotic finale of "Byrd" and the piercing melancholy of "Block", this is an outstanding record from start to finish.

Fisz Emade Tworzywo: "Mamut" (2014)

The Waglewski brothers, known as Fisz and Emade, have been working as a team since 1999. They're regarded as the two most important figures in the local alternative rap scene and have released albums both under their own names and under various monikers (Bassisters Orchestra, RHX, Tworzywo Sztuczne). These are records marked by pretty solid beats, but without understanding the language, it's hard for rap not to grow tiresome.

Their collaboration with their father, Wojciech, a historic figure in Polish music, led them in 2008 to broaden their horizons, tackling both jazz and alternative rock - a tendency later reaffirmed by the garage-rock project Kim Nowak.

It's with this album, though, that the duo comes full circle, achieving both their biggest commercial success — 32 weeks on the charts — and their definitive artistic maturity. There are still a couple of rap tracks, both featuring Dj Eprom, but the rest splits between infectious alternative-dance anthems and slow, atmospheric-keyboard noir pieces, essentially trip-hop.

The arrangements are sophisticated, the synth lines have deep, evocative sounds, or sharp, aggressive ones depending on the need, and the piano drips with nostalgia. "Wróć" boasts sounds worthy of Jean Michel Jarre, "Karate" flaunts a thrilling electric organ solo, "Wojna" closes with a string bed of tragic flavor in its grand finale, the nocturnal "Zemsta" and "Ślady" sound like they came straight off a Nujabes turntable, while "Pył" and "Zwiedzam świat" are dancefloor bombs.

Fisz's sensual voice is joined here and there by those of Justyna Święs and Kasia Nosowska, while Emade produces with his trademark meticulousness (he's also the one behind the desk on the Lao Che album examined just above).

Happysad: "Jakby nie było jutra" (2014)

Poor Happysad. Hailing from Skarżysko-Kamienna, a small town in the southeast of the country, fronted by singer Kuba Kawalec and now eleven years into their career, they are perhaps the single most hated entity among Polish indie listeners. First of all, they're hugely famous despite mining sounds similar to a multitude of other bands that have stayed firmly underground, and worse still, their lyrics are entirely devoted to dissecting the trials of adolescence. One sin can be forgiven, but two of this magnitude are genuinely hard to overlook.

Then there's the music, which has always been decent and over the last two albums has grown ambitious and full of color. That apparently doesn't count for anything with the supposedly more discerning Polish public, but it counts for me, and I'll put them on this list without a second thought.

"Jakby nie było jutra" is their sixth album, their third to hit number 1 on the charts, and it contains a handful of great songs. It picks up where "Ciepło/Zimno" left off two years earlier, an album that saw their initially rather flat indie-rock open up to electronic intrusions and occasionally brush against emo and noise-rock. The new target is a crowd-pleasing space-rock formula that conjures futuristic scenery without losing its commercial edge.

The pandering punk-funk of "Tańczmy" feels slightly out of place, but the rest of the tracks hit the mark dead-on, from the cosmic journey of the splendid single "Smutni ludzie" to the galloping bass of the ecstatic "Ten dzień", by way of the cybernetic folktronica of "Ciała detale" and the frantic distortions of "Mbtv".

Tomek Makowiecki: "Moizm" (2013)

Makowiecki's fifth album overall, second as a solo artist, earned excellent reviews and encouraging traction in the local underground scene.

Like Podsiadło, Makowiecki also got his start thanks to a talent show, one of the first imported into Poland, way back in 2002. In Italy, he'd have been dropped by his label years ago, or else he'd have had to force his way to success through sterilized, focus-grouped pop music aimed squarely at the notorious average housewife. In Poland, though, after more than a decade he can still release an album like this one, with no concessions to the mainstream and top-tier production values, despite never having enjoyed major commercial success.

What's striking is the taste on display across these ten songs, four of them in English, moving effortlessly between danceable rhythms and velvety pop-ambient. A David Sylvian still interested in easy melodic hooks could have put out something similar — just try slow numbers like "Ostatni brzeg" and "Your Foreign Books" to see what I mean.

Two masterpieces push this album toward true grace, even though, aside from their shared elegance, they don't seem to have much in common. One is the alternative-dance trinket "Holidays In Rome", the other is "Dziecko księżyca", ten minutes of intense light with keyboards piling up to create an endless play of waves, refractions and melodic streams, while Makowiecki's voice glides over the landscape with the delicacy of an angel. To craft such a gem, the young man enlisted two legends of Polish music: Józef Skrzek, former keyboardist and leader of the prog trio SBB, and film-score composer Daniel Bloom.

Ania Rusowicz: "Genesis" (2013)

The daughter of a well-known musician, Ania had no trouble breaking into the music world, first as a member of the middling pop group Dezire, with whom she took part in Eurovision, and then as a solo artist. It's in this latter role that she pursues her own vision, releasing "Mój Big-Bit", a pleasant but unremarkable debut album on which she reinterprets several songs from her mother Ada Rusowicz's repertoire, followed by "Genesis", a mature work made with the help of the ever-present Emade, once again behind the mixing desk.

Ania's voice is at once statuesque and seductive, carrying the gravitas of old-school divas like Anna German and Dalida, but unlike them she sings over rock backing and can turn aggressive when needed, as on the garage rock of "To nie ja," all fuzz and tight rhythms.

The twelve tracks on the tracklist are devoted to a psychedelia that, were it not for Emade's hi-tech production, could pass for old-school: surf guitars, Farfisa organ, orchestral flourishes, Morricone-esque asides, Eastern flavors and quirky rhythmic twists all feature.

The menu includes the solemn exoticism of "Nie uciekaj," the repetitions of "Mantra," the sudden shifts of "Polne kwiaty." An album that perhaps deserved better than its modest number 30 chart placing, but things don't always turn out for the best, not even in such a stimulating scene.

Afro Kolektyw: "Piosenki po polsku" (2012)

Fisz and Emade aren't the only ones who started out in rap and later landed on the sounds of alternative music.

Afro Kolektyw formed in Warsaw in the late Nineties and stood out right away for their high level of musicianship. The instrumental backing tracks are played entirely by the band members, with no turntables or samplers involved. It was only a matter of time, then, before rap alone would no longer be enough.

The turning point comes with this fifth record, a gentle collection of jazzy indie-pop. "Niemęskie granie" is colored by jangle guitars, pianistic flourishes and a subtle layer of Mellotron (or something close to it), "Wiążę sobie krawat" sounds like a Phoenix song with a children's choir, "Człowiek guma" packs two minutes of filtered vocals and exquisite acoustic guitars, "Krótki film o kaszlu" is a surprising ballad built around a stuttering piano, "Żałosny wieczór z czarnoksiężnikiem" is a laid-back funk number with cocktail-bar vibes, "Nasza doskonałość" is more or less the same thing sped up twofold. It's a real grab-bag of smart, sophisticated music, dense with analog electronics and warm fusion textures.

As for frontman Michał "Afrojax" Hoffmann, while there was never any doubt about his skills as a rapper, here he also reveals himself to be a fine singer, with a rough-edged but intense timbre.

To this day it remains the only album by the band to have entered the Polish charts.

Niechęć: "Śmierć w miękkim futerku" (2012)

The Polish jazz scene has been among the richest in the world for roughly half a century, and worthwhile releases haven't been lacking even in recent times. A prime example is the debut by Niechęć, a Warsaw quintet who move across nine instrumentals through the different moods of contemporary jazz, shaping a melodic character that's relatively easy to approach, blending the precision of fusion with the rawness of alternative rock, the landscapes of science fiction with the crooked pulses of prog, the catalepsy of post-rock with the grandeur of a film score.

The design is well balanced and puts the immediacy of the songs first, through delicate piano sketches, glinting guitars, blaring sax, blankets of keyboards, mysterious double-bass movements and sudden percussive cascades.

It's a title that has since become a cult favorite among enthusiasts, even though sales were negligible and the project survives only thanks to live shows and the support of national radio, on which it has performed several times.

At the helm of the band are bassist Stefan Nowakowski and saxophonist Maciek Zwierzchowski, who wrote eight of the tracks on the record.

Maria Peszek: "Jezus Maria Peszek" (2012)

Born in Wroclaw in 1973, Maria Peszek is an extremely controversial figure, starting with her lesbian-chic look, which certainly doesn't win her many fans in a country that - aside from a handful of, admittedly buzzing, cultural hubs - isn't exactly among the most open-minded (though thinking about it, we Italians should probably keep our mouths shut on that particular subject). A stage and TV actress, writer, game designer, singer, and jack-of-all-trades, she reaches her creative peak with this third album, a remarkable commercial success that spent four weeks at number 1, despite the fact that, among the media, only the national radio's third channel gave it any real coverage.

The reason is easy to explain, given lyrics that, besides laying bare the artist's own fragilities by describing the nervous breakdowns she suffered a few years earlier, also lash out at Catholicism and patriotism. That's an unacceptable stance in those parts, and it goes a long way toward explaining how polarized the public is when it comes to her. A Pole will rarely offer a measured opinion on Peszek: you either love her or you hate her.

The former would certainly be the preferable option, given the quality of the songs, dominated by teeming synths, obsessive programming, powerful drums and distorted basslines. It ranges from ferocious electro-punk anthems like "Sorry Polsko" and "Wyścigówka" to dramatic crescendos like "Ludzie psy" and "Pan nie jest moim pasterzem".

Strachy na Lachy: "Dodekafonia" (2010)

Despised by more discerning listeners almost as much as Happysad, they share some of the same traits: slogan-like lyrics designed to hook a young audience, and considerable popularity achieved through sounds that fall squarely within the alternative sphere.

The band was founded in 2002 by singer Krzysztof Grabowski and guitarist Andrzej Kozakiewicz, both former members of Pidżama Porno. The idea was to launch a side project, but the huge success they found starting in 2005 led them to gradually shelve their main band, with which they've essentially stopped releasing albums.

"Dodekafonia" is the fifth release under the Strachy na Lachy name, their first number 1 of their career, and to date their most musically accomplished work. The glossy reggae component that marked their early records has been stripped away, to the point that the track that comes closest to that territory here is a noir vignette like "Ten wiatrak ta łąka". The folk element too, always their trademark, has been refined, steering clear of easy pub-style sing-alongs in favor of hushed ballads like "Cafe sztok". Room has instead been made for guitars in a Franz Ferdinand vein, and for electronics, understated but crucial in giving the tracks their drive. The result includes winning singles like "Ostatki – nie widzisz stawki" and "Twoje oczy lubią mnie".

Ride the wave of great music

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