An intimate sound of Slovak folk ballads with the specific vocal feeling of Zuzana Homolová

Zuzana Homolová is a living legend of Slovak folk/world music devoting her energy to creating specific renditions of folk ballads,  balancing between various genres and bridging centuries.

It is no wonder, that her name has become synonymous with the genre throughout Slovakia.  The trio consists of her long-standing sideman Samo Smetana playing the violin and a multi-genre guitarist Miloš Železňák, well-known for his jazz, blues and rock projects. The cooperation of musicians resulted in further unanticipated dimensions. The group connects the seemingly unconnectable, discovering the jewels of forgotten folk culture and presenting them in the new light of contemporary music. Trio´s latest album When the soldier was drafted goes back to the wars from different periods, including the first “great” war. War stories are illustrated from different perspectives, and this relates to both music and lyrics. Despite a rather gloomy theme of war, the whole album is intimate, emotional, not just dramatic, as might be expected. This album ranked No. 16 in WMCE (April/ 2019).

Zuzana Homolová – lead vocal, guitar
Samo Smetana – violin, vocal
Miloš Železnák – guitar, multi – instrumentalist

Ňet vekšeho rozkošu (Slnko records, 2013)
Keď vojačik narukoval (Slnko records, 2018)

The album When the soldier was drafted ranked No. 16 in WMCE (April/ 2019).

Reviews/Quotes:
…In the latest recording of fifteen songs on the CD When a Soldier Was Drafted, the stories revolve around blood, love, sweat and miscellaneous smells of the war, including its consequences. Poetic and curious images, as if emerging from the musical and verbal heritage of our ancestors, striking metaphors, discrete ambiguities or occasional freakish excursions into the realm of dialects, create a pleasurable mosaic displaying instrumental and compositional originality. Offbeat harmonies with jazz-like strains of guitars, almost a psychedelic sound of violin along with various exotic instruments create a delicate mix of “old and new” music for our ear and our brain cells…
Pavel Malovič, Týždeň

„Joy with risks. Zuzana Homolová killed the folk languor.
…Joy from the title of the album of Zuzana Homolová is rather down-to-earth. Not even the greatest Czech bard of gluttony Bohumil Hrabal would have described the vice more poetically and pertinently than her. The impatient old woman with a bowl of gnocchi dumping onto the bed communicates through humour of an image rather than by relying on words from an archaic East Slovakian dialect. The album Nothing Like the Joy is an adorable view on the cunning, sensual and also soulful world of the folk poetry, sternly hidden behind the mask of folk poetry…“
Petr Vizina (CZ) 2013 review of the album Nothing Like the Joy (Slnko Records 2013)