Savranenko’s rise has been a slow burn: Before making it, she was a cashier at a supermarket, sold makeup at a bazaar, and worked as a kindergarten teacher. (She holds degrees in psychology and teaching.) Savranenko always wanted to make music, though. She was born in the Kirovogradskaya region of central Ukraine, which was late to receive the influx of Western and Eastern goods after the fall of the Soviet Union. Her life changed when she first heard “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio at age 12; a few years later, her father bought her Eminem’s album The Eminem Show on a work trip abroad. “It changed my world,” says Savranenko. “When you write a regular song, a pop song, you have only a few lines. In one line there are only a few words and it is such little information. So when you rap, you can say a larger, more interesting story in longer lines. So I began to rap to tell more stories.”

Savranenko moved to a village south of Kiev at the age of 14; this past year, she relocated to central Kiev. Entering the country’s nascent rap scene involved “finding herself” and paving the way for a new era. “Earlier when I started rapping, no one liked it. Everyone was like, ‘Yuck! Women must make borscht,’ ” she tells me. “No one listened, no one accepted it, and because of that I didn’t tell anyone. I just wrote for myself. There are those who knit socks, make food, and I rap. That is my hobby.” Even her choice of language drew criticism. “I released my first track in Ukrainian, but [at the time] all of my friends were talking in Russian,” says Savranenko. (Growing up, she spoke surzhyk, a mix of Ukrainian and Russian commonly spoken in central Ukraine.) “They all listened to Russian rap, so I started writing in Russian so everyone would like it.” At the time, much of Ukraine’s population spoke Russian—but after the Euromaidan protests in 2013, which caused a boom in nationalism, the Ukrainian language became more widely spoken. That prompted Savranenko to switch. “I have a lot of words in Ukrainian and I wanted to say all of these words,” she says.