Brodka is bending all the rules with her infectious Brutalist-inspired pop

Let’s play a game. I’m a chart-topping musician, with multiple platinum selling records in my country. I have based entire albums around idiosyncratic themes and instruments. I script, style and direct my own music videos. I’ve played SXSW. I was invited to perform an MTV Unplugged set, complete with Nirvana covers. I write and perform in multiple languages. I’ve won Pop Idol. Who am I?

Ok, so it’s not Michelle McManus, or even Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood. When Monika Brodka was crowned the winner of the Polish version of the talent show phenomenon in 2004, at the age of just 16, she won more than a television programme. “You are also winning a recognisable face,” she tells Calvert Journal from her Warsaw home.

That’s an understatement from an artist who is refreshingly unconcerned about appearing immodest about her achievements – the now mononym-ed Brodka is one of the most popular musical stars in Poland. But how she got to this point contrasts with the classic scenario of the rise to stardom and subsequent fall followed by similar individuals in English-speaking countries: an immediate success in the glow of victory, followed by decline, being dumped by their record label, and ending in relative obscurity. Brodka achieved that initial rise with her first two records Album and Moje Piosenki. But after that, she broke away from mainstream pop, first stylistically with her third record Granda - on which she synthesised classic folk instrumentation with electronics - and then, by switching to an independent label. Her next release saw her tackle the church organ, on the densely orchestrated and unexpectedly funereal Clashes. But the change of direction only saw Brodka increase her standing in the charts.

“When are you guys going to stop asking me about this?” she pleads jokingly as we discuss those early years. But she is aware of how unique her way into the industry was. “My story is very special,” she reminisces. “You become more like a celebrity than just a singer, when you win a show like that. People don’t treat you seriously, but you are popular. And I decided at some point in my career that, okay, it was fun to do that when I was a teenager, but now I was getting older — more mature musically and personally — I had something to say and I would like to do something that’s going to be fully mine. It was a long journey to change people’s perceptions about me and my music. I think people realised this change wasn’t created by a record label. I don’t know if my music would be so popular now without having had that initial boost. It certainly made things easier for me.”

There is a wariness about any artist who has come up within the popstar-manufacturing industry that shows like Pop Idol represent — or at least the idea that they lack autonomy. Whether that’s indeed the case or not, Brodka gradually wrested back any control she didn’t already have, and has continued to shape her career in her own vision. Now, there can be no such accusation of dependence. Her new album, BRUT, recorded and mixed in London and Warsaw, is the most emphatic statement of that yet. A mix of very personal musical influences, the album is the embodiment of total creative control, combined with a clear social and political message of empowerment. It is a subversion of how the wider music industry may perceive Brodka as an artist, and how society perceives her as a woman.

“I wanted to create this kind of androgynous person, which doesn’t belong to any gender”

If Brodka’s entire career has been about turning the image of what she started as inside out, BRUT is a microcosm of that, preoccupied as it is with flipping things – gender, sounds, architecture – on their head.

“I’m very much a project-concentrated person,” she says. “When a new one comes along, everything happens around it. I’m not only creating the music and producing the recording, I’m also thinking about all the visuals, music videos, and how the scenography at a concert will look like. I’m involved in all aspects.”

No stranger to reconfiguring academic ideas — like liturgical outfits or Polish folk traditions — into sonic and visual inspiration, this time it was brutalist architecture that set her project in motion. “I wanted to create this kind of androgynous person, who doesn’t belong to any gender. And when I was thinking about this character, I pictured someone in an urban context, rather than in the countryside or in a church. I saw it as a social story; about people living in the city, and about behaviour that doesn’t fit neatly into the scheme society creates; when you’re in between and don’t really belong.

“And that made me think of brutalist architecture: you have these buildings which are kind of ugly, but they’re pretty too, placed between skyscrapers and much older buildings, and we don’t really know what to do with them. Some people love them, some people hate them. I love looking at them; I find them inspiring generally. But [that whole thought process] also related to the idea of reimagining something’s place — a building, a person. Brutalism is part of modernism, and every new chapter in every postmodern movement uses the ashes of the old to create something new.”

But the real trigger for the album was turmoil. As Brodka wrote and recorded, the world’s social strata were being stretched by the shared tragedy of the pandemic. Poland, however, was undergoing a further upheaval of its own. People began to protest about an ultra-conservative, religiously-influenced government that continued to deny women freedom to access abortions, or to recognise gender equality. Indeed recently, the country has been marked by the marches for fundamental rights.

“I was protesting, of course. The whole country is divided in two and people really want a change,” Brodka says. “It’s crazy, like living in an abstract world. On the one hand, we’re living in a very vivid, energetic, cool capital city that doesn’t look different from other capitals in Europe, and I have great friends who are well-educated, interesting people. On the other, you have a government and police-force who persecute, attack, and arrest protestors without reason. It’s important to be engaged, to speak up, especially as a recognisable person, and for others, and people outside Poland, to become aware of what is going on and do something about it.

“Building tolerance is a huge problem here. Hopefully these songs encourage people to be less judgmental towards others, because we unfortunately have this kind of national part of our character where we think we know best about what other people should say, how other people should look. I think it’s important to show – whether it’s someone like me who feels 100 per cent a woman or otherwise — that I feel totally okay in my own skin, and no one is gonna fucking tell me I shouldn’t.”

This manifests itself in multiple interlocking ways, the aesthetic coherence of which is testament to Brodka’s focus of intention. Built from selected folk instruments and environmental sounds like voices, metal railings and “the air from the studio because it sounded tuned in a different way”, the sounds of the album itself are fused together to create a mix of dreamy trip-hop and clanging post-punky pop, the old and the retrograde alongside the sound of the modern city. But while the soundscape is somewhat in keeping with other recent breakthrough music from eastern Europe, rather than wallowing in gloom like those other acts, BRUT turns it all into something more joyful.

There are also less deeply buried references: the brutalism-backed videos for “Game Change” and “Hey Man”, see Brodka interchanging traditionally male and female roles until they become blurred and unrecognisable. Throughout the record, Brodka engages different forms of anti-patriarchal self-actualisation — from choosing strong female role models (“I don’t see anything more powerful than someone like PJ Harvey — a girl, onstage with a guitar, playing solo, singing purely”), to making allusions to the gender non-conforming Balkan Sworn Virgins.

Even Brodka flexing her control on songs like “You Think You Know Me” hits back at gendered accusations. “I have a strong character, I’m very professional and everything comes from me, musically and visually,” she says. “So, people have this idea that it’s very tough to work with me, though usually it comes from someone who doesn’t know me at all and has never met me.”

And so, Brodka — a star in Poland, making music in English, inspired by pointedly non-mainstream genres —seeks to break out of the Polish charts with BRUT. “Abroad, I’m still a debut artist,” she admits realistically. “One of the reasons I sing in English, honestly, other than the fact that it just feels intuitive, is it’s very hard to break into the English market, and why make that more difficult by singing in Polish? I would really like someone from here to be more recognisable outside of Poland and draw attention to other artists, music and festivals here.”

She thinks again back to the start of her career. “Really, I never felt that I wanted to be a popstar. When people ask me why I’m releasing music in English and trying to make an international career now, it wasn’t that I dreamt about a stadium-sized, Rihanna-style career. It was more being able to travel and to present my music in other countries and be ‘popular’, let’s say, among people who listen to alternative, cool music. I wanted to be respected by this group of people. And I don’t need to be listened to and liked by everyone.”

BRUT is out now via [PIAS] Recordings.