Dana Vynnytska ordered an Indian harmonium, a keyboard worked by a hand-pumped bellows, at a point when she’d just started to see light again after a hard stretch, and sat with the instrument alone until melodies began to surface. What came out of those sessions became “Będę Szczęśliwa” (“I Will Be Happy”), the first single from DAGADANA‘s sixth studio album, Lumen. DAGADANA is built around Vynnytska and Daga Gregorowicz, a Polish and Ukrainian duo who write and sing in both languages, once Bartosz Nazaruk wrapped an afro-funk-inspired beat around Vynnytska’s chords and Mikołaj Pospieszalski slid a bass line underneath.

Polish and Ukrainian verses trade off across “Będę Szczęśliwa,” each one answering the other, both circling back to the same picture of a river, all bends and sudden current, and a woman learning to swim with it instead of fighting it. “Gdy odpuszczam jestem kołem. Uratuję nas oboje,” Vynnytska sings at the turn of the song, “When I let go, I become the wheel. I’ll save us both,” a line she wrote out of her own experience of forgiving, herself first, then somebody else, to find her way back to that light. Gregorowicz puts it even simpler: happiness starts the moment you drop a grudge instead of carrying it around.

That’s a long way from where DAGADANA started, back in 2006, when Gregorowicz and Vynnytska met at a jazz workshop in Kraków and began singing together before either of them had a band name for it. Pospieszalski and Nazaruk joined not long after, and the four of them have spent eighteen years since turning that meeting into a Fryderyk, Poland’s top music industry award, festival stages from Glastonbury to Oslo World, tours through 34 countries that took them from the Moroccan desert to Beijing’s Forbidden City, and “Jesień, Tańcuj,” the song they co-wrote for the Oscar-nominated film Chłopi.