“The HU” – a folk metal band from Mongolia, which combines traditional throat singing and almost thousand-year-old instruments with the aesthetics of the “heavy metal” genre, giving it all the wide scope of its great predecessor Genghis Khan – the creator and emperor of the largest empire in the history of mankind. On September 8, they will perform at the “Palladium” concert hall, tickets are available from May 3.
The group “The HU” was born in 2016, so its history is not too long yet, but they have noticed that they did not erase from their career the two years when due to the Covid-19 pandemic the concert activity had to be postponed to an unknown time – Mongolian folk metallers on the website ” YouTube” introduced the world to its national cuisine (Hu’s In The Kitchen?).
Similar to other countries that were ruled by communists for a large part of the 20th century, access to Western European culture, including music – jazz and rock – was denied in Mongolia from 1924 to 1992, and the promotion of Mongolian folk music was also limited.
Everything changed after the Mongolian revolution in 1990, with the onset of the financial crisis, but more and more outside information began to flow into this chaos, including cultural expressions in the United States and Western Europe. So the singer Bayarmagnai “Dashka” Dashdondog created the group, taking on the duties of producer and songwriter himself, and choosing the other members from among the students of the Mongolian State Conservatory of Music and Dance, who learned the tradition called throat singing and also played ethnic musical instruments.
The basic composition of “The HU” (“hu” means “man” in Mongolian) has remained the same and men whose names and instruments they play are better not to be translated into Latvian: Galbadrakh “Gala” Tsendbaatar – throat singing, violin (horsehead fiddle); Nyamjantsan “Jaya” Galsanjamts – organ, recorder, throat singing, Enkhsaikhan “Enkush” Batjargal – violin, throat singing; Temuulen “Temka” Naranbaatar – tovshuur (a leather-covered two-stringed wooden instrument played before battles by the Mongols in the 13th century), accompaniments. On tours, the band is joined by four other men who play traditional rock instruments – guitars and basses, drums and percussion, and also sing backing vocals. The idea of the band was to play “heavy metal” music, which was banned in the country in the previous decades, not by copying already known bands of the genre, but by continuing to study and carefully find the available resources from Mongolian traditional culture, integrating them as much as possible into rock music, which made them unique and interesting to the whole to the world. They called their style “Hun rock”, drawing inspiration from the history of their land – from the Hun Empire (3rd century BC – 1st century AD).
At the end of 2018, “The HU” published the first two songs on the “YouTube” channel – “Yuve Yuve Yu” and “Wolf Totem”. They reached number one on Billboard’s Hard Rock Digital Song Sales chart the following spring, making The HU the first Mongolian artists to top Billboard’s chart. In the year of their first success, “The HU” already met with the President of Mongolia, who praised them for popularizing their country, and then they went on their first foreign tour – 23 concerts in 12 European countries.
Currently, the group has two studio albums – “The Gereg” (2019) and “Rumble Of Thunder” (2022). They have received the highest award of the Mongolian state – the Order of Genghis Khan (“Order of Genghis Khan”) for bringing Mongolian culture to the world, their music has been used in horror films and two video games (“Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order”, 2019 and “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor ”, 2023), Mongolian songs have been covered by a number of well-known Western rock musicians. Also – “The HU” released a cover version of Metallica’s song “Sad But True”, being selected as one of the 53 artists who earned the honor to participate in “The Metallica Blacklist” thirty-year anniversary edition of “Metallica’s” famous “black album”, where they also perform “Through The Never”.
In March 2024, the famous British “heavy metal” veterans “Iron Maiden” have announced that “The HU” will warm them up at the North American concerts of the “Future Past” tour.
