Pussy Riot's New 'I Can't Breathe' Video Is Dedicated to Eric Garner

On Wednesday, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina dropped an “industrial ballad” that is their first song in English, according to the Guardian. In the clip, the women are dressed in Russian OMON riot police uniforms and lying in a shallow grave of dirt. As they sing “It’s getting dark in New York City, I need to catch my breath” in a voice over, unseen people throw dirt on their bodies, burying them alive. As the last chorus comes to an end, the music swells and Richard Hell reads Garner’s last words. It is chilling, sobering and infuriating all over again.

The two recorded the song last summer during the city’s organized protests against the death and failed indictment of the Officer Daniel Pantaleo who choked Garner to death on tape. The women say “I Can’t Breathe” is also about their own country’s struggles.

“Since last spring we have been living in a condition of war and hatred towards the rest of the world that the Kremlin called the “Russian Spring”… a bloody war in Ukraine, fuelled and controlled by Russia, a civilian plane that was shot down by a rocket that killed hundreds of people from around the world – a lot of our plans and artistic conceptions were changed by news from the war zone that was arriving daily.

We really could not breathe for this whole last year. Our previous ideas did not speak to what was happening in the conflict zone in Ukraine as we were realising that Russia is burying itself alive in terms of the rest of the world. Committing suicide. Daily. And so the song I Can’t Breathe is about us and our country as well. It is about Russia, too.”

And despite serving 16 months in a Russian prison for performing an anti-Putin protest song in 2012, they still have their humor. Nadya and Masha joked that their burial was probably a dream come true for many of their detractors. God bless the punks, man.