Nice Cliques

The band Nice Cliques is four young Russian musicians balancing on the thin boundary between old and new, thus creating their original sound. The musicians, for generalization's sake, refer to their style as "indie art-rock", although one of the cornerstones in the band's creative output is the freedom from stylistic framework. In the music of the band one will find a lot more than it might seem at first glance - like all good music, Nice Cliques fully opens to the listener through repeated listenings.
The project was born out of collaborative musical experiments by Ivan Ilyin and Alexander Kasheva early 2000s under the moniker "Nizam". In 2006 Roman Makarov (bass, flute, keyboards) joined the band, and in early 2007, Anton Solodky (lead guitar, keyboards) completed the line-up. Until early 2009 the musicians were in the state of the creative search, working on material from their early years. In the spring of 2009 the band received its present name - Nice Cliques, and from that moment the creative growth accelerated considerably. In early summer the group recorded the EP "We Don't Even Like Them" consisting of six songs, which served as a kind of summary of the last two years of the band's development. In the same period the group resumes its concert activity.
In September 2009 the band began working on their first full-fledged album. The musicians chose not to keep secret of the already finished songs, releasing them to the public eye in the form of singles. Three subsequent singles followed in the fall and winter of 2009.
In May of 2010 the long awaited LP "Populra Art" with twelve songs by both Ivan Ilin and Anton Solodky has been presented at the major Saratov club, "Machine Head". The reaction of the critics and casual listeners has been mostly positive, with Fuzz magazine citing the album as "thoroughly British in its composure" and "covering a wide range of styles and influences from art-rock to pop to psychedelia". Later that year the band gave their first concert outside of the native city with a short gig in St-Petersburg in June.
Almost immediately after completion of the LP the work on the next big release got under way. In the fall of 2010 the band presented several new songs in concert, culminating in the release of the new single titled "The Room" in December 2010. The single does not mark a significant departure from the band's previous work and have been enthusiastically accepted by the group's followers. In a somewhat controversial move, the band plans to record and release a short EP as soon as January 2011, with songs of the more pop-oriented nature.