Ziferblat are a Ukrainian alternative-rock band whose name, in Ukrainian, means clockface. The trio is made up of twin brothers Daniil Leshchynskyi on vocals and keyboard and Valentyn Leshchynskyi on guitar, together with drummer Fedir Khodakov. They formed in 2015 and spent almost a decade building a following in Ukraine before a much wider European audience met them in 2025, when they represented Ukraine at the Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Switzerland, with the song “Bird of Pray”. That performance finished ninth in the final with 218 points, after winning its semi-final, and it turned a band long described in Ukraine as an alternative act into one of the country’s most recognisable recent Eurovision representatives.
What makes the Ziferblat story different from a sudden breakthrough is its length. The band did not arrive at Eurovision on a first attempt. They were longlisted for Vidbir, Ukraine’s national selection, in 2023 without reaching the shortlist, finished second in Vidbir 2024, and only won Vidbir 2025 on their third cycle of trying. Each step added to the same catalogue rather than replacing it: an early extended play, a debut album built from songs written years earlier, and then a Eurovision entry that carried the band’s older interest in Ukrainian musical tradition into a bilingual, contemporary rock song.
Who Ziferblat Are
Ziferblat are a three-piece band from Ukraine. Daniil Leshchynskyi, also spelled Danylo in some sources, sings and plays keyboard. His twin brother Valentyn Leshchynskyi plays guitar. Fedir Khodakov plays drums and joined the current line-up in 2019. The twins were born on 15 November 1996, and Khodakov was born on 28 February 1998. Earlier members included keyboard player Viktor Nikolenko and drummer Valentyn Oliynyk, both with the band from 2015 to 2018, and Yevhen Shevchenko, who played bass guitar and drums between 2018 and 2021. The present trio, therefore, is the result of a settled line-up that has now been together for several years, rather than a group assembled for a single contest.
The band’s name is written in Ukrainian as Tsyferblat, and transliterated in English as Ziferblat. The clockface image suits a band whose music often looks backwards and forwards at the same time: older Ukrainian sounds, 1970s-influenced rock textures, and modern alternative production. In interviews around Eurovision, the band pushed back against any single label for their sound. Terms used for them have included progressive rock, art rock, alternative rock, and the Ukrainian phrase often translated as moustache funk, a style associated with the 1960s and 1970s that blends Western rock with traditional Ukrainian elements. Daniil Leshchynskyi has said that their song contains some elements of that tradition, but that no artist likes to be defined by one genre, and that Ukrainian culture has had a strong influence on their work. That resistance to a neat label is useful for a listener approaching the catalogue for the first time, because the early songs, the debut album and the Eurovision entry do not all sound the same.
Ziferblat are signed, for their releases, to the label Geisha Ninja Samurai. Their work is usually credited to the band as a whole, including production on “Bird of Pray”, which is a useful detail: the Eurovision song was not handed to them by an outside writing camp, but written by all three members. The songwriters credited for “Bird of Pray” are Valentyn Leshchynskyi, Daniel Leshchynskyi and Fedir Khodakov, with Valentyn Leshchynskyi credited as lyricist. That shared authorship matters because it connects the Eurovision entry directly to the band’s earlier writing, rather than treating Basel as a separate project.
Formation in 2015 and the First Years
Ziferblat were founded in 2015. Daniil and Valentyn Leshchynskyi are fraternal twin brothers, and the early years were spent finding a sound and a stable line-up rather than chasing a contest entry. The band’s first extended play, “Kinoseans”, was released in December 2017, a title sometimes translated as “Cinematic Session”. That early release is a useful starting point for understanding the band’s later work: it was not a Eurovision audition piece, but a small, self-contained record made before the band had any national-selection profile.
In 2019, the band released the single “Vnochi” and performed it on the Ukrainian edition of “X-Factor”. “Vnochi” is remembered by fans as one of the band’s early signature songs, and the programme gave them a television audience beyond the clubs and small halls where they had been playing. That television exposure gave them a wider audience, but Ziferblat had already been working for four years by then.
The first years, then, are best understood as a slow build. The band released music, performed, changed members, and kept writing, without the pressure of a contest deadline. That history is why the later Vidbir attempts feel like a natural extension of a working band’s career rather than a manufactured bid for attention, and it is also why the band’s catalogue rewards listening beyond the Eurovision entry.
Early Singles and the Road to a Debut Album
After “Vnochi” in 2019 came “Zemlya” in 2022, a single that arrived with a music video. Later in 2022 came “Dlya choho ty pryyshla”, followed in February 2023 by “Dysko-Fanko Terapiya”. Both of those later songs would be included on the debut album, and together they show the band moving between Ukrainian-language material and a funk- and groove-led sound. “Zemlya”, which means earth or land, arrived after the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, and it is not the same song as “Bird of Pray”, a confusion worth avoiding because the two songs are sometimes mentioned together in summaries of the band’s work. “Dysko-Fanko Terapiya”, by contrast, points to the funk and groove elements that have always sat alongside the band’s rock base.
This period also shows the band becoming comfortable singing in Ukrainian and, later, in English. That bilingual comfort would become central to “Bird of Pray” and to “Place I Call Home”, but in the early singles it appears more gradually, with Ukrainian as the main language of the debut period. For a listener, the singles are a good way to hear the band before the album: shorter, more direct, and less layered than the full-length record, but already carrying the twin brothers’ melodic and guitar interplay that defines the later work.
By the time the debut album arrived, then, Ziferblat were not a new band, but a band with a small catalogue, a settled line-up and a growing live reputation. The album did not need to introduce them from scratch. It collected and extended work that had been developing for years, and it gave the Vidbir selectors, when they came to consider the band, a substantial body of work to judge rather than a single song.
Peretvorennya: The Debut Album of 2023
Ziferblat’s debut album, “Peretvorennya”, was released on 7 April 2023 and presented at a solo concert on 22 April 2023. The title translates as “Transformation”, and the album contains 13 songs, primarily written between 2019 and 2020. It includes “Dlya choho ty pryyshla” and “Dysko-Fanko Terapiya”, and it is sung primarily in Ukrainian. For a listener coming to the band through Eurovision, it is the best starting point after “Bird of Pray”, because it shows the band’s range without the pressure of a contest format: longer songs, more varied arrangements, and a clearer sense of the twin brothers’ writing partnership.
The album also brought the band recognition inside Ukraine’s music industry. In September 2023, Ziferblat won the Muzvar Awards category for Best New Names in Alternative Music. They were also reported as nominated in three categories at the Megogo Music Awards: Alternative Indie Artist of the Year, Music Video of the Year, and Album of the Year. Those nominations and the win are worth recording carefully: they show that the band were already being recognised as an alternative act before any Eurovision association, and they help explain why the later Vidbir success did not feel, to Ukrainian audiences, like a debut.
Listening to “Peretvorennya” now, after Basel, also changes how “Bird of Pray” sounds. The Eurovision song’s mix of Ukrainian and English, its folk-inflected melody and its rock arrangement are not new inventions for the contest, but developments of ideas already present on the debut. The album, in other words, is not a prelude to be skipped, but the record that makes the Eurovision entry intelligible as part of a longer career.
Vidbir 2023 and Vidbir 2024: Two Attempts Before the Win
In 2022, Ziferblat were included in the longlist for Vidbir 2023, but did not advance to the shortlist. That result is sometimes missed in summaries that jump straight to the 2025 win, but it is part of the same story: the band were already on the selectors’ radar, yet not yet chosen. The longlist appearance showed that their debut-period work had reached the national-selection process, even if it did not carry them into the final.
In 2024, they reached the Vidbir final with “Place I Call Home” and finished second, with 11 points from the jury and 8 points from the audience. The song was in English, and its theme of belonging and place would return in a different form in “Bird of Pray”, although the two songs are not versions of each other and should not be treated as such. The 2024 result also marked a step up in visibility: the band undertook their first nationwide tour in 2024, and the second-place finish gave them a public profile that made the 2025 attempt feel like a continuation rather than a fresh start.
The two attempts together explain the 2025 win better than any single factor. By the time of Vidbir 2025, Ziferblat had been through the longlist, the final, and a national tour, and they had a debut album and a catalogue behind them. They were not an unknown act asking for a first chance, but a working band returning for a third cycle, with a song that drew on the same themes of home, separation and belonging that had run through “Place I Call Home” and much of their earlier work.
Bird of Pray: Writing, Meaning and Release
“Bird of Pray” was released on 24 January 2025, ahead of the Vidbir 2025 final. It was written by all three band members, with production credited to Ziferblat, and it is sung in Ukrainian and English. The song is listed as 2 minutes 59 seconds in its original version and 3 minutes in the Eurovision version, a small difference that reflects the contest’s three-minute limit. It was released through Geisha Ninja Samurai and later appeared on the band’s 2025 release “Of Us”. The bilingual choice is structural rather than decorative: the two languages carry different parts of the song’s feeling, and the shift between them is part of its design, not a translation added afterwards.
The bird in the title is a symbol of freedom, movement and the passing of time, and the song is concerned with the separation between Ukrainian citizens divided by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The band have described the bird metaphor as paying tribute to the resilience of the Ukrainian people and to hope for a better tomorrow, combining nostalgia and hope with a request for care and love. That combination is why the song resists a simple reading: it is not only a protest song, nor only a love song, but a song about distance and the wish to close it.
Critical response to “Bird of Pray” was mixed. In Ukrainian coverage, some listeners praised the song’s theatricality and the way it used the Ukrainian language, while others found it stylistically unusual or even inaccessible. The contest outcome, however — a semi-final win and a ninth-place finish in a field of 26 — made the song the band’s most widely heard work regardless of critical opinion. That is the measurable part of the story, and it provides the frame for everything else that followed.
Winning Vidbir 2025
Vidbir 2025, organised by Suspilne, was held on 8 February 2025. Applications had run from 17 September to 10 November 2024, twenty entries were longlisted, and nine were shortlisted after auditions. The result was decided by a combination of 50 percent jury voting and 50 percent public voting, a format that rewards both professional judgement and audience support. Ziferblat ranked first by the audience and second by the jury, giving them a total of 19 points, ahead of MOLODI in second place with 16 points. The balance of that result is telling: the band won the public vote outright, while the jury placed them second, which suggests a broad appeal that was not confined to one voting group.
The final itself opened with a performance that placed Ziferblat in a longer lineage. Nine Ukrainian Eurovision stars from the past performed “Smile With Me” by Nazariy Yaremchuk, including Ruslana, the 2004 winner, Jamala, the 2016 winner, Tymofii Muzychuk of Kalush Orchestra, the 2022 winners, and Alyona Alyona and Jerry Heil, who had finished third in 2024. That opening was a reminder of the tradition Ziferblat were joining, and it set a high bar for the new winner. The announcement came on 8 February 2025, almost exactly a year after the second-place finish in Vidbir 2024, completing a three-year arc from longlist to shortlist failure to finalist to winner.
For the band, the win was not only a contest result, but a confirmation that their catalogue and live reputation had been recognised by both the public and the jury. It also set up the Basel campaign, where the challenge would be different: not winning a national selection, but translating a Ukrainian-language and English-language rock song for a European audience that had not followed the band’s earlier work. The Vidbir win gave them that platform, and the months between February and May 2025 were spent preparing the staging, the promotion and the live performance that would carry “Bird of Pray” to Basel.
Eurovision 2025 in Basel: Semi-Final and Final
Eurovision 2025 took place in Basel, Switzerland. Ukraine was drawn in the first semi-final on 13 May 2025, where Ziferblat performed “Bird of Pray” in position 5 and qualified among the top ten. The semi-final result was later revealed as first out of fifteen participating countries, with 137 points, decided by televoting only. That first-place semi-final finish was a strong signal: the song had connected with a European audience that had not followed the band’s earlier work, and it set up a final performance with genuine momentum.
In the final, Ziferblat performed in position 7 and placed ninth out of 26 performing countries with 218 points. The split tells a more detailed story: they were fourteenth in the jury vote and sixth in the televoting, receiving 12 points from the public of Czechia, Israel and Poland. The difference between the jury and public placings is worth noting, because it mirrors the Vidbir result, where the audience had also ranked them higher than the jury. The ninth-place finish also maintained Ukraine’s record of reaching the final and finishing in the upper half of the table, a consistency that has become part of the country’s Eurovision identity. Source: Kyiv Independent, 18 May 2025, “Ukraine takes 9th place in Eurovision 2025”, which reports the ninth-place finish and 218 points, 60 from the jury and 158 from the audience.
Ukraine’s Eurovision history provides the context for that result. The country first participated in 2003, won in 2004 with Ruslana’s “Wild Dances”, won again in 2016 with Jamala’s “1944”, and won a third time in 2022 with Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania”. Ukraine is one of only two remaining countries with a complete semi-final qualification record, a fact that makes each new entry part of a longer run rather than an isolated attempt. Ziferblat’s ninth place, therefore, sits inside that history: not a win, but a solid result that kept the qualification record intact and placed the band alongside the country’s most successful recent representatives.
Of Us and the Work After Basel
“Bird of Pray” was included on “Of Us”, released on 2 May 2025 through Geisha Ninja Samurai. The release is described in some sources as an album and in others as an extended play, because of its shorter running time. The tracklist is: “Of Us” gathers “Bird of Pray” together with “Place I Call Home”, “Doteper i nazavzhdy”, “Litak”, “Dysko-Fanko Terapiia”, “Vnochi”, and “Tilo”, and it places them in a single, carefully sequenced arc — an EP-length statement of what the band’s sound had become after a decade of work. It is, in that sense, both an extension of the Eurovision moment and a summary of the band’s pre-Eurovision catalogue. After Eurovision, the band continued to release new material and to perform, and their later work continues to be covered in Ukrainian music media.
After Eurovision, in 2025, the band released “Bud zdorov”, featuring Artem Pyvovarov and The Byca, and “Nezrivniannyi svit krasy”. Those releases show the band continuing to work after the contest, rather than pausing on the Basel result, and they suggest that the post-Eurovision period is being used to broaden the catalogue rather than to repeat the contest entry. The band were also nominated at the Eurovision Awards in 2025 in the Style Icon category, a nomination that reflects the visual and staging identity they had built around “Bird of Pray” as much as the song itself.
The post-Basel period is also when earlier work gained new listeners. Songs from “Peretvorennya” and the early singles, previously known mainly to Ukrainian audiences, began to appear in playlists and recommendations alongside “Bird of Pray”, and the band’s longer history became part of how new listeners understood them. That delayed discovery is a common pattern for Eurovision acts, but it is especially relevant for Ziferblat, because their catalogue was already substantial before Basel and rewards the kind of listening that goes beyond a single song.
Return to Vidbir: Guest Performers at the 2026 Final
Ziferblat returned to Vidbir 2026 not as competitors, but as guest performers. The Vidbir 2026 final was held on 7 February 2026, hosted by Lesya Nikityuk and Timur Miroshnychenko, with ten acts competing to represent Ukraine at Eurovision 2026 in Vienna, decided by 50 percent jury voting and 50 percent public voting. Leléka won that final with “Ridnym”. The guest performers included Ziferblat, Zlata Ognevich, TVORCHI, Jamala, Satoshi, who would represent Moldova in 2026, and Svitlana Tarabarova with three former Ukrainian Junior Eurovision participants. The presence of so many past representatives underlines how Vidbir functions as a gathering of Ukraine’s Eurovision history, not only as a selection for the next entry.
Ziferblat opened the show, revisiting “Bird of Pray” as part of the traditional finalists’ parade. That opening slot is a recognised honour: the previous year’s winners return to open the next final and hand over symbolically to the new competitors. For a band that had spent three cycles trying to win Vidbir, opening the 2026 final as the reigning winners was a visible marker of how far they had come, from longlist in 2023 to opening act in 2026.
The return also included a further role for the band. Daniil Leshchynskyi was announced as the spokesperson for Ukraine at Eurovision 2026, announcing the points of the Ukrainian jury during the grand final. That role, given to a trusted figure from the previous year’s winning act, is another sign of the band’s standing within Ukraine’s Eurovision community, and it kept Ziferblat connected to the contest even after their own competing days had, for the moment, passed.
Sound, Influences and What to Listen For
Ziferblat’s sound is best described as alternative rock with strong Ukrainian roots, borrowing from funk, progressive rock and art rock without settling into any one of those labels. The band have resisted a single genre description, and that resistance is reflected in the catalogue: the early singles, the debut album, the Vidbir entries and the Eurovision song each emphasise different elements, from funk grooves to folk-inflected melodies to rock arrangements. A listener who expects one sound from the band will be surprised by the range, and that range is part of the band’s identity rather than a lack of focus.
The twin brothers’ partnership is central to that sound. Daniil Leshchynskyi’s vocals carry the melody, while Valentyn Leshchynskyi’s guitar provides texture and, in “Bird of Pray”, the lyric itself. Khodakov’s drumming gives the songs their drive, and the current line-up’s stability since 2019 has allowed that partnership to develop over several releases rather than being reset for each project. The result is a band sound that is recognisable even when the genre shifts, because the same voices and playing styles run through the catalogue.
For a new listener, the suggested order is to start with “Bird of Pray”, then “Place I Call Home”, then “Peretvorennya” in full, then “Of Us”. After that, the early singles “Vnochi”, “Zemlya” and “Dysko-Fanko Terapiya” are worth hearing, because they show the band before the contest spotlight and before the debut album’s fuller arrangements. That order moves from the most familiar song to the deeper catalogue, and it respects the band’s own history: a decade of work that does not depend on the contest for its identity, but that the contest brought to a wider audience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the members of Ziferblat?
Ziferblat are a three-piece band: twin brothers Daniil Leshchynskyi on vocals and keyboard and Valentyn Leshchynskyi on guitar, together with drummer Fedir Khodakov. Khodakov joined the current line-up in 2019. Earlier members included Viktor Nikolenko, Valentyn Oliynyk and Yevhen Shevchenko.
What song did Ziferblat sing at Eurovision 2025?
They sang “Bird of Pray”, written by all three band members and sung in Ukrainian and English. The song was released on 24 January 2025 and won Vidbir 2025 on 8 February 2025, before representing Ukraine at Eurovision 2025 in Basel.
What place did Ziferblat finish at Eurovision 2025?
Ziferblat finished ninth in the Eurovision 2025 final with 218 points, after winning their semi-final with 137 points. In the final split, they were sixth in the televoting and fourteenth with the juries, receiving 12 points from the public of Czechia, Israel and Poland.
Did Ziferblat compete in Vidbir before 2025?
Yes. They were longlisted for Vidbir 2023 without reaching the shortlist, and finished second in Vidbir 2024 with “Place I Call Home”, scoring 11 points from the jury and 8 points from the audience. They won Vidbir 2025 on their third cycle of trying.
What is Ziferblat’s debut album called?
Their debut album is “Peretvorennya”, released on 7 April 2023 and presented at a solo concert on 22 April 2023. It contains 13 songs, primarily written between 2019 and 2020, and is sung mainly in Ukrainian.
Did Ziferblat perform at Vidbir 2026?
Yes, but not as competitors. They returned to the Vidbir 2026 final on 7 February 2026 as guest performers, opening the show with “Bird of Pray” as part of the traditional finalists’ parade. Leléka won that final with “Ridnym”.
What did Ziferblat release after Eurovision 2025?
“Bird of Pray” was included on “Of Us”, released on 2 May 2025. Later in 2025, the band released “Bud zdorov”, featuring Artem Pyvovarov and The Byca, and “Nezrivniannyi svit krasy”.