“The muse won’t come unless I bleed” is a line that keeps returning throughout “Cut”, the debut single from Tbilisi post-hardcore band tears please. Singer Aleksandr “Sasha” Korotov writes about medication, sleepless nights, barely eating and the miserable idea that he can only make something worthwhile when he’s suffering.
The five-piece call their mix of post-hardcore, mathcore and early-2000s emo “fifth-wave emo”, a term that’s been causing arguments among emo fans for years. It gained traction around 2021, covering a loose, internet-connected generation of bands taking the 2010s emo revival into stranger territory, with bedroom pop, shoegaze, electronics, math rock and screamo all finding their way in. Home Is Where, glass beach and Your Arms Are My Cocoon are often grouped together under the label, although they sound wildly different. tears please come at it from the heavier post-hardcore end, with odd time signatures, screaming and an obvious fondness for pop hooks.
By the time “Cut” appeared on Bandcamp on 3 August 2026, tears please had already spent months playing gigs around Georgia and had made their first trip into neighbouring Armenia. Twelve days later they were at Lions of Rock, a three-day festival on Georgia’s Black Sea coast, sharing the billing with international names including Dead by April and The 69 Eyes.
They’d built up a full live set, started travelling and found people who wanted to book them before they’d got much of that music onto streaming platforms. It wasn’t some miraculous discovery by a festival organiser, either. Sasha had seen an advert, written to the promoters himself and explained exactly what the band could offer.
They were willing to take a chance on the songs. The guys had been doing much the same thing since getting together in early 2025, although the reason Sasha started writing them was considerably less cheerful.
At the time, he was dealing with depression and the end of a long relationship. He was also trying to build a life in Tbilisi after leaving his home country. The other musicians who would eventually join tears please were in similar circumstances, having moved to Georgia for social and political reasons.
The current lineup is made up mostly of Russians, with lead guitarist Nikita Izygin coming from Ukraine. Their first bassist, Raphail Gadirov, was originally from Azerbaijan. Sasha has chosen to keep the details of their departures private, partly because some members still have relatives in Russia who could face legal trouble if he discussed those circumstances publicly. For some of them, the events of late February 2022 were an important turning point.
Starting again in Tbilisi meant finding work, meeting people and trying to get settled somewhere unfamiliar. Sasha’s relationship had ended after several years, and he found himself writing a depressive, metalcore-ish demo. He posted it on his personal <a href=”https://t.me/vvvoltageparty/211″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>Telegram channel</a> with a joke about what he’d call an emo band if he ever started one.
“In case I once happen to start an emo-band, I’ll call it TEARS PLEASE and it will sound like this – absolutely nothing to do with emo sound, yet it will be my emo phase”.
A couple more demos followed, and the joke gradually became an actual band. Sasha put word out through the local community that he needed musicians. Raphail was the first to respond and brought along his friend Pavel Kuzhilev, who would become the drummer. They even met for the first time in a rehearsal room, playing along to Sasha’s demo of “Unfound”. Guitarist Sergei Lakhtin and vocalist/guitarist David Vlasov joined soon afterwards.
There were already several songs ready to work on, so the new lineup could get straight into rehearsals. Learning them took roughly six months of serious practice before they felt ready for their first gig. Sasha had written parts that were tricky to play together, and some of those complicated rhythms would remain part of the band’s approach.
He’d also found something he hadn’t been getting from sitting alone making demos.
“Actually live performing even during rehearsals gave emotional releases and a sense of mutual support that writing demos alone, obviously couldn’t give to me personally or to us as a band.”
Their first shows began putting them in front of people who weren’t necessarily familiar with the same kinds of music. At Faded Blue in November 2025, tears please shared a bill with indie-rock band Pontless Cake, post-punk act deaDPilot and sludge-metallers Kremaster. It’s a fairly good illustration of the different corners of Tbilisi’s underground that they’ve had to move between.
Sasha reckons the local DIY scene is large, although he finds it somewhat limited in the range of styles being played. Black metal, punk and hardcore have established communities, and hard techno is a major part of the city’s nightlife. Emo and modern post-hardcore are a much smaller part of that picture.
“To an outsider, it might even look a bit old-school, but it definitely has its gems.”
Psychonaut 4 are one of the better-known names from the local depressive black-metal scene. Sasha also points to hardcore punks xResistenciAx, longtime punk-rock band Vodka Vtraiom, alternative group Tape Visitors and garage-rock act Will Kolak. The 2026 Distorment Festival lineup is one of his recommendations for anyone wanting a decent introduction to the local heavier underground.
On the electronic side, Didgori Movement and Helheim have their own communities, with artists such as VNDGR, OREZ and Human among the names he brings up. Events take place at clubs including KHIDI, Kick, Mechanica and Junkyard, while the city also hosts much larger gatherings such as Tbilisi Open Air.
Small live venues include Tsre, Dedaena, Revolution, Mechanica and Secret Place. Some are run by immigrants, and they don’t all have an easy time staying open. Sasha mentions the now-closed Sine and Dirty Habit when talking about how frequently independent spots can appear and disappear.
There’s also the sometimes awkward business of getting to know people across different communities. Sasha says that Russian-speaking immigrants can encounter a cold reception when approaching local bands or venues, and conversations occasionally turn towards uncomfortable political questions. He prefers to leave individual encounters out of the story. There are Georgian musicians and spaces that have welcomed tears please, and those connections have helped the band keep booking gigs.
Musically, their position can be pretty funny.
“It is obviously kinda hard to fit in – we might seem relatively soft and “gay” (in the worst, most close-minded sense of the word) for DSBM fans, and absolutely devilish screaming nonsense for indie-rock enjoyers.”
They’ve ended up playing alongside shoegaze and Midwest emo acts as well as much heavier bands. Sasha isn’t especially concerned with forcing tears please into a particular local category. He’d simply been missing the kind of live post-hardcore he liked, so he started making it.
“Essentially I guess we are fulfilling the hunger for live post-hardcore and emo music for ourselves. So yes, we’re creating that kind of music basically for ourselves and trying to keep its sound aesthetic relatively modern.”
The fifth-wave label has become a bit of a running joke in emo circles. Some fans see it as a useful name for a generation of bands happy to mess around with the genre. Others reckon it’s so broad that practically anything with an emo connection can qualify, whether it sounds like bedroom screamo, mathy pop-punk or experimental indie rock. By 2026, people were already arguing about a sixth wave, which gives you some idea of how seriously everyone takes the numbering.
For tears please, the musical part is easier to explain than the terminology. Sasha puts it pretty simply:
“Mainly we focus on making post-hardcore + emo influences, adding a bunch of chaotic stuff, odd time signatures, yet also keeping it relatively pop with hooks from time to time.”
There’s another question here, too. Much of the fifth-wave conversation grew out of American emo communities and the internet, with bands finding each other online even when they lived thousands of miles apart. tears please started through that same kind of online contact, but their songs have been developed in rehearsal rooms and at gigs in Tbilisi, a city where Sasha was struggling to find this kind of music in the first place.
“Not sure if we can really speak of cultural differences between our music and US/UK experiences just yet, but the differences surely exist. I guess the time will tell.”
There’s another small detail about how they got together that’s quite specific to their circumstances in Tbilisi. Telegram has been involved at nearly every stage, from Sasha’s first demos to finding musicians and, eventually, arranging festival bookings.
He doesn’t see it as some special feature of Georgian DIY culture. It’s the messenger that many Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian immigrants use constantly, sometimes almost as a replacement for conventional social media. Georgia’s own DIY community, he notes, tends to work much more through Facebook and Instagram.
Even the band’s Facebook presence came relatively late. Sasha jokes that they eventually started a page because they probably had to.
Their first shows outside Georgia came through Armenia. In July 2026, tears please played Muha Bar in Yerevan, followed by an appearance at Dilirock in Dilijan at the end of August. The trip gave them a chance to meet more people and see how their music went down in another part of the region.
Sasha doesn’t know the Armenian underground particularly well yet, but he’s very happy with how those first experiences turned out.
“We are not really acquainted with an Armenian scene yet, but damn – the shows were amazing for us, we absolutely loved creating noise at Muha bar (Yerevan) and Dilirock 2026 (Dilijan). That was a beautiful mess. We’ve received such unnatural amounts of love, we can’t even tell.”
Dilirock was an outdoor event with a much more punk-minded DIY character than Lions of Rock. The crowd’s response and the people around the festival left the band wanting to return.
Other groups have been moving between Georgia and Armenia too. Sasha mentions Malo-Pomalu, Slow Shutter and xResistenciAx as examples of bands using the route, especially among immigrant musicians. Tbilisi and Yerevan are close enough to make regular trips possible, and the visa arrangements for Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian citizens make travelling between the countries relatively straightforward.
There’s still plenty for tears please to figure out. They’re trying to get to know more venues in Yerevan and have been told that the Armenian capital has fewer spaces available for DIY shows. Sasha is careful to present that as something he’s heard while getting involved, since the band are still newcomers to the scene.
By this point, playing live had become their main way of reaching people. The set existed, the musicians knew how to play it together, and they were getting gigs in two countries. Their recording catalogue was another matter.
The Lions of Rock booking came about in an almost comically ordinary way.
“Actually we can’t say that the miracle happened and they miraculously found us through the community. Everything was kinda simple – I stumbled upon their ad and immediately sent an email to their team:”
Sasha introduced tears please as a post-hardcore band with progressive elements. He gave the organisers their name and Instagram account, and admitted that they didn’t have proper releases to show them yet.
“We don’t have any releases yet, but we have a solid, tight, and interesting setlist.”
The organisers replied by email, and the conversations later moved to Telegram, where they exchanged files and arranged calls with the festival management.
Sasha has his own theory about why they ended up getting the booking.
“I believe we succeeded in finding ourselves in the shortlist because of being post-hardcore, quick and definitely non-fascist)”
Lions of Rock took place over three days in August on Georgia’s Black Sea coast, with an international bill that included The 69 Eyes and Dead by April alongside acts from Georgia, Russia and Armenia.
The festival was also a first for its organisers on that scale. Sasha recalls that they had plenty to learn while putting it together, with difficulties appearing from the planning stages through to the actual event. He even recounts that the organisers consulted ChatGPT while figuring out how to run a big festival. It’s his account of what happened behind the scenes, and one he tells with some amusement.
For tears please, the important part was getting a spot on the bill and playing their songs to a crowd outside the usual local gigs. They were booked for 15 August, less than two weeks after putting out “Cut“.
That debut single finally gave people something to take home from a band they’d otherwise mostly encountered onstage.
“Cut” is concerned with an ugly relationship between creativity and personal suffering. Sasha’s words move through medication, exhaustion, lack of sleep and the habit of telling yourself that feeling terrible might somehow make you a better artist. There’s bitterness in the idea that pain has to be useful, and the lyrics keep returning to it.
He recorded the vocals in his own kitchen with a cheap condenser microphone. The rest of the recording was made with the band’s earlier lineup, including Sergei Lakhtin on guitar, David Vlasov on guitar, Nikolay Golubev on bass and Pavel Kuzhilev on drums. Sasha wrote the music and lyrics, handled the synthesiser and produced the single, while Ilia Lomidze mixed and mastered it.
The current lineup has Sasha, also known as Shortcake, singing and handling most of the writing and concepts. David “Day V” Vlasov shares vocal duties and mainly plays rhythm guitar, Nikita Izygin handles lead guitar, Nikolay “Nico Go” Golubev plays bass and Pavel remains on drums. Everyone takes part in developing and performing the songs.
The band’s next recordings are already finished, and they’re being worked on with the same fairly domestic approach.
Pavel’s living room is where they record the instruments, with the drummer also taking care of the engineering. For the new vocal sessions, they’ve been working with their friend Dzmitri Bulanau at his small garage studio, D’arts. Ilia Lomidze is handling mixing and mastering again. The band are producing the songs themselves.
Two tracks, “Departure” and “Vacant Space”, are planned for release together around the end of November 2026. Both have been part of their live set for months, so the songs will already be familiar to people who’ve caught tears please at gigs. The recordings were complete when Sasha spoke to IDIOTEQ in October, although the final sound was still being worked on.
He’d eventually like to put out a full conceptual album. There’s no finished album concept or firm schedule yet, and he’s expecting the band to release music gradually as singles. That means getting used to making promotional videos and short clips too, something he doesn’t sound particularly enthusiastic about.
“It’s kinda scary to think of this promotional layer.”
For now, he’s more interested in making sure each song has enough ideas to keep people interested. He wants the individual tracks to have their own character before he tries to bring them together into a larger record.
“Basically I’m looking at every song as a small journey. It should be interesting, fun and absolutely not-boring. So an album – that’s a big Journey with a capital “J”. And, I hope, we’ll keep finding people to join the very emotional voyage.”
There’s already a fair amount of music that people have heard live but can’t yet play at home. “Cut” is the first piece available through Bandcamp, and tears please have collected their live footage, streaming links and other information on their official page. “Departure” and “Vacant Space” should be next, with the band hoping to get both songs out before the end of November.
