Two traditions, one arrangement, neither one flattened for the other.
Otyken formed in Krasnoyarsk Krai out of the Siberian taiga, built around musicians from the region's indigenous communities and centered on instruments most listeners outside Russia will never have encountered directly — the igil, the jaw harp, traditional throat singing carried by voice alone, no processing required to make it land. Their earlier work leaned hard into that traditional foundation, letting the instrumentation and vocal technique carry the song on their own terms. "NET" does something different, and it's worth sitting with why that difference works instead of undercutting the thing that made the group distinctive in the first place.
The band tags this one plainly as folk-rock, and that's an honest description rather than a marketing shorthand. A real rock arrangement sits underneath the traditional elements — drums with actual weight behind them, guitar work that wouldn't feel out of place in a straightforward rock single — but the throat singing and traditional instrumentation aren't decoration layered on top to signal "authenticity" to a wider audience. They're structurally load-bearing. Pull either half out and the track stops working, which is the real test of whether a genre blend is doing something honest or just borrowing texture.
Genre fusion built around indigenous or traditional music has a real, well-documented failure mode — the traditional element gets reduced to color, a flourish that signals "exotic" without actually shaping the song's structure. That's not what's happening here. The traditional vocal and instrumental lines aren't ornamenting a rock song; they're setting the terms the rock elements have to work around. It's a genuinely rare balance, and it's the reason this is worth a real listen even for people whose usual lane has nothing to do with Siberian folk traditions.
Otyken's members are documented as living and working within Siberian indigenous communities along the taiga, and the group has been explicit about wanting to bring that tradition to a global audience without dissolving it into something unrecognizable in the process. "NET" is a real, current example of that project actually succeeding — not a hypothetical, not an aspiration statement in an interview, but a track that does what the group says it's trying to do.