Pause, acoustics and Kamni: how Tequilajazzz came back to the studio

The last album before the pause was Zhurnal zhivogo (2009). A reviewer for Lenta.ru noted strings and keyboards that had never appeared in the band's rock before, and synthesizers that pull the sound back toward the eighties and new wave. A year later Fedorov announced the end. In an interview with Kommersant on 26 July 2010 he explained that an attempt to rebuild the group from the inside had broken it. He felt the sound had slid into amateur club rock, and his hand had not recovered from the strain of the previous autumn. Tequilajazzz played their last concert on 25 March at the Tsokol club. Fedorov named seventeen years of survival as the band's main achievement.

The pause turned out to be short. On 1 December 2013 the band played an anniversary concert in Moscow. By 2018 guitarists Kostya Chalykh and Roma Shatokhin had joined, and with them Fedorov took up an idea that had started almost by accident at home: taking old songs apart for acoustic guitars.

The result was Nebylo, the band's first acoustic album. It draws mostly on songs from Vyshe oseni and Zhurnal zhivogo, rearranged in what the band calls a cyber-acoustic style, plus one new piece, Nebesnaya pech, written after the main work as a closing vignette. According to the band's account to Meduza, Fedorov showed the newcomers harmonic turns that usually vanish under loud rock. The presentations were set for 27 April 2018 at RED in Moscow and 1 May at Kosmonavt in St Petersburg.

In spring 2021, as Fedorov told Meduza, Tequilajazzz played Celluloid in full and began recording new material. He was listening to music of the seventies, especially from before 1976: art rock, fusion, lavish studio records. A hand injury had kept him away from the bass for four months.

Kamni came out on 1 October 2021. It is the band's seventh studio electric album if mini-albums are not counted. Fedorov told Fontanka that in February the group dropped nine finished songs because their mood no longer fit, then wrote new ones in two or three weeks that spring. Recording took about two weeks in May and June at the Dobrolyot studio, and mixing wrapped up in July. Andrei Alyakrinsky worked as sound engineer. Twelve years separate Zhurnal zhivogo from Kamni, yet Fedorov did not call it a pause: in his words, Tequilajazzz, Zorge and Optimystica Orchestra continue one story.

He described the album as conceptual, with its own internal drama, cheerful and doomed at once. For the image he took the Titanic musicians who kept playing while the ship went down. The single Nikogo ne ostanetsya came out in late May. Its text is anxious, its chorus sits in a major key, and Fedorov explained that choice by feeling, not calculation. Anastasia Beltyukova drew the cover.

The band planned to sell the vinyl at presentation shows. The release concert was set for 4 November at Kosmonavt. Fedorov said then that Tequilajazzz were already thinking about a follow-up, though they had no finished songs yet.