From cramped vans and lost luggage to arena stages and global tours, Roman tells us about the realities of life on the road, and the work it takes to keep a band evolving.
In this wide-ranging conversation he reflects on the physical and mental toll of nonstop travel, and the strange balance between exhaustion and fulfillment that defines touring. He also looks back on Jinjer’s early days, his musical influences, and the band’s shifting creative roles, while looking ahead to new music, future tours, and the discipline required to keep pushing forward.
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J: Roman, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
Roman: Thank you for inviting me.
J: You are Ukrainian, a citizen of a country that since 2014 has been in a situation of war. How are you doing, and how is your family?
Roman: Family is somehow safe, and we’re safe.
J: You just did a tour in North America, opening for Babymetal. You are about to go on tour again in North America, opening for Trivium, and then in January you have a headlining tour in Europe. Are you very tired already?
Roman: Yes and no. It’s mixed feelings every time. When you’re on tour, you want to go home. When you’re home for several months, you miss being on tour.
J: I can’t remember who said this phrase but, basically, the idea is that when you’re a musician you play music for fun, and the real work is traveling. That travel is what really takes a toll on a performer and makes life very difficult. Has that been a very big challenge in your career?
Roman: Yeah, from the beginning. We traveled with our own van, different vans at different times. When we were driving ourselves it was harder than being in a nightliner. Now, with nightliners, tours are smooth for me; I feel great when I’m a nightliner, and it’s better than having a flight every day, and then a hotel, and then no sleep.
That is fucked up. If you’re doing this for like a month or a month and a half, flying almost every day or every two days, every day in a new hotel, that really affects your physical and mental health. It’s crazy.
J: If you’re flying, you’re also spending so much of your day at the airport!
Roman: I hate it. I hate it because if you have a two-hour flight you need to be there 3 or 4 hours before the flight, because you have a lot of gear, and a lot of things since you’re traveling with 10 or more people.
Also, the airport systems are not perfect. In some places they are really bad. Every time we fly I feel like the people who work there know less than me. We stand there for a couple of hours to check our bags, then the tags are wrong and everything is a mess. And it’s a mess like 50% of the time, and it’s a mess from their side, while we’re just standing there and waiting.
J: Did you ever have any major problems? Your stuff being left behind?
Roman: Yeah, for sure. It was before the Babymetal tour. We flew from Copenhagen to Chicago via Warsaw. The plane from Copenhagen was a small plane, and they didn’t put any of our luggage on the plane, so we landed without anything. We checked our airtags and saw that our stuff was still in Europe, so we had to wait until they brought it on another flight the next day.
J: It must be so scary because what you’re bringing are your work tools, basically.
Roman: It’s not the first time… and it won’t be the last time. Ask any band; they destroy cases, they lose luggage. I have stories for 40 minutes about these luggage situations.
In the summer of 2024 we flew to France, and arrived with zero luggage. Sometimes we’re missing just a couple of things, but this time it was was all our shit.
J: And how long were you touring on your own van? I have been in some tour vans and I’ve never got the impression that I would like to spend a very long period of time inside of them.
Roman: It was long. In the beginning we were touring on a Mercedes Vito, owned by our bass player Eugene. We were 5 or 6 people, plus the luggage in the cargo space… well, it’s not really a cargo space, so we just put everything inside.
Then we switched to a Renault Traffic. It had a bit more space, and we could go for longer distances because the Vito had some problems with the engine every time.
In 2018 we bought a Volkswagen Crafter, and took it to some guys in Ukraine where they completely customized the interior based on what we wanted. So they built cargo space, and we had some sleeping bunks, so that two people could sleep at a time. It had nine seats, so it was comfortable, and we toured like that for a couple of years.
Our first nightliner tour was in Europe, in 2019. But after that we would still sometimes just jump on the van and go do some summer festival shows, without nightliner and without flights, carrying all of our backline. We did this even during COVID. We sold it in 2022 to some guys who make funerals. I think they destroyed all our customization.
J: It’s good to know that it’s being used for something!
Speaking of tours, and as we were saying before, you were recently opening for Babymetal. This was a very interesting combination because, even though I’m not a fan of their music, it was obviously a huge opportunity for a band like Jijner, since they’re such a huge band. How did this tour come about?
Roman: We got an offer, It wasn’t anything special. Before this we had already played arenas and other big venues when we toured with Disturbed in 2023, and this time I was reminded of that because we played some of the same venues.
I enjoyed this tour. Also the guys from Bollywood were there, so that was nice. Not your typical tour package, mixing us with guys from India and Japan.
J: How were your merch sales?
Roman: Oh, they were good.
J: That’s excellent. And how did you feel Jinjer fans reacted to working with Babymetal? I saw some reactions online that seemed, well, not terrible, but definitely a bit surprised by this.
Roman: Personally, I don’t even check comments about what people say, because you get lost. You won’t understand what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right. There are a lot of opinions, and they don’t need to be in my head.
J: You’ve been with Jinjer since 2009, so pretty much since the band started-
Roman: Uh, 2010? I don’t remember because at that time my friend Dima (Dmitriy Oksen) was already in the band, and he invited me to play guitar before even Tati had joined. But I wasn’t one of the original members. I was with another band and he asked me to play, and then Tati joined. I think our first show was in December of 2009, and our second show was already the following year.
J: Your first album with Jinjer was in 2014, right?
Roman: No; Dima and I played and composed Inhale Do Not Breathe.
J: I got that wrong!
Roman: It’s not a problem. It’s confusing even for us sometimes.
J: What Jinjer is now, this sometimes thrashy sound with a lot of breakdowns… is that what you always had in mind for Jinjer, or has that been changing over the years?
Roman: It’s changing. At the beginning I was just playing with the guys in the rehearsals, just knowing their songs, as a second guitar player. Then Dima found someone else, but that person left, so they played their first show with just one guitarist with Dima, with Tati. So then Dima asked me to join as a member of the band.
I said yes, so we started to compose the Inhale, Do Not Breathe EP. I enjoyed it a lot. I recently spoke with Dima, and we were just remembering how cool it was… just sitting and composing songs in our shitty rooms, with bad sound, and bad equipment.
Since then it’s changed a lot because there are no original members left.
J: What music were you into when you joined Jinjer?
Roman: I listened to a lot of nu metal. Before I listened to a lot of Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, thrash metal… all kinds of metal, death metal, black metal, punk rock, and everything. Hip-hop, I listened to Cypress Hill, House of Pain, rap music…
When I started to play with Dima it was the era of Kill Switch Engage, Chimaira, Lamb of God... Then deathcore with Suicide Silence, All Shall Perish, Chelsea Grin… We also listened to a lot of Gojira. So, a lot of music.
J: I’m not a good musician by any definition, but when I started playing guitar the musicians I wanted to emulate were people like Adrian Smith or Dave Murray from Iron Maiden. Who did you have in mind when you started as a musician?
Roman: James Hetfield, for sure, for the rhythm. I was not a big fan of solo or of musicians like Joe Satriani or Steve Vai, who are guitarists who just play their own stuff. I like rhythm more than solos, so I was focused on good rhythm guitar players. Also, from nu metal, it was Slipknot guys, Jim Root and Mick Thompson. Wes Borland was also a big influence, as was Dimebag Darrell, someone who could play solos and rhythm and anything at an insane level.
J: And what is your role in Jinjer now? I know that you’re the guitarist, of course, but I saw that since 2016 it’s been Vlad who’s taken over the songwriting. So what role did you play in, for example, Duel, your latest album?
Roman: Vlad compose most of Wallflowers and Duel, our last two releases, but now I am stepping back into the composing. I’ve already prepared some riffs and ideas, and Vlad is doing the same.
For Duel I was focused on the pre-production and production. It was Vlad and me, sitting in our rehearsal studio, trying different drum heads, microphones, speakers, tubes, amps, pedals, etc. And we tried to find the sound we liked, and then we recorded everything, like a pre-pro, sent it to Tati, who loved the tones of our instruments, and then sent it to Max Morton in Kyiv, who was like “yeah, I can work with these tones.” And then we recorded everything again.
J: I know that you’re living in Poland, same as Vlad, and that Tati is in the US. Has that made working very difficult?
Roman: When we all lived in Kyiv Tati was the person who’d show up at the rehearsals and on the recording, but was not involved in composing. We prepare prepare the complete songs, pre-record them and then send them to Tati, who prepares the vocals. So from that perspective nothing has changed, except the distances. Eugene also records his parts at home so… it’s maybe a bit more difficult, but it’s doable. It’s not going to to destroy Jinjer.
J: Jinjer is probably the biggest metal band to come out of Ukraine. Compared to how things were when you started, how have you seen the changes in the Ukrainian metal scene?
Roman: There were some big Ukrainian bands in Kyiv, and we were fans of theirs. Some of them were some of my favorite bands in the whole world, not just in Ukraine. Vlad was in a band called Zlam, and I would listen to them even before I met him. There were about 5 bands that were composing, playing, and recording at a really high level, and even now, 15 or 20 years later, I can listen to their records.
I don’t really dig into the Ukrainian metal scene nowadays but for me the best were the Ukrainian metal bands was like from 2010s and 2000s.
J: In January you’re going to be doing a headlining tour in Europe.
Roman: Textures and Unprocessed are going to be opening. I like Textures, and I’ve never seen them live. They’re a really good prog band. And we kind of know Unprocessed already. We’re not friends or anything, but we know each other. Their guitarist Manuel is an insane guitar player, and the whole band is just great musicians.
It’s a really progressive tour package, so I think it’s my favorite so far.
J: What have been some of your favorite tours? I know that you played with Babymetal, Sepultura…
Roman: It was great when we toured with P.O.D. in the States. Suicide Silence were also great. Same with Sepultura. We did 8 or 9 shows with Slipknot, and that was really amazing.
J: I take it you’ve been able to meet some of your heroes then.
Roman: Yeah! When we played in the main stage at Download Festival in 22 or 23, 5 minutes before the show I saw that James Hetfield had showed up on the side of the stage. And he was looking at me! He stayed, I think, for the whole show. I couldn’t even turn my head because I was just… it was intense, but it was great.
Also with Limp Bizkit. John Otto and DJ Lethal. We hung out iwth them at Rock-am-Ring and at Rock im Park, two days in a row. I was a fan of Limp Bizkit in the 2000s, so this was amazing. Like… “Wow.”
J: You mentioned earlier that you already have some ideas for kind of songwriting in the direction of Jinjer’s next album. Do you have a timeline for this? Do you work on this while on tour?
Roman: I think we will collect some ideas while on tour. Maybe some riffs… we will see. I never feel like I have to do this by a certain date. It’s not about inspiration; you need to work. Sit and work on the music, and the inspiration will come.
J: Roman, thank you so much for the time that you gave me today.
Roman: Thank you!
