“Dancing has its time, mourning has its time”, runs a line in “Gamachume”, the new single from Tbilisi artists Tamada and DillaNext, and a Georgian supra works exactly that way. The supra is the country’s traditional banquet, a long table of food and wine presided over by the tamada, who holds the room and proposes toast after toast, to peace, to family, to the homeland and to the dead. The guests drink after each one and often break into song. Singer and producer Lasha Chkhapelia named himself Tamada after that role, and across Dionysus vs Tamada and 2024’s 9 Deadly Sins for Tamada he has written his lyrics as toasts in ancient Georgian and set them over electronic beats.

This time the glass is raised to Sukhumi, the main city of Abkhazia, a Georgian region on the Black Sea. Abkhaz separatist forces, backed by Russia, seized the region in the 1992–93 war, and most of the world still recognises it as part of Georgia. Chkhapelia and Zura Jishkariani, the novelist and poet who records as DillaNext, were among around 250,000 Georgians driven out as children. The lyric pictures a boy with a pistol and a rose, with Black Sea currents running down through his genes. The pair used the same image on last year’s “Sokhumeli Bichi” (“Sukhumian Boy”), where the sea ran through the veins of the boy of the title. In both songs the city passes down by blood, from parents who lived there to children who left too young to remember it.

Another verse turns a burial into a planting: others dig the earth, he is the one laid in it, and the people who took him for dead find they have planted a tree of life. Thirty-three years after the war emptied Sukhumi of its Georgians, two of the children it drove out are putting the city into songs made in Tbilisi, and that is the tree the verse describes.

“Gamachume” arrived with a video on 27 September on Deep Douqan, the label behind Tamada’s most recent singles. It closes on its title, Georgian for “silence me”, five times over, sung by the same voice that earlier claims it can “break armies apart”. At a supra, the tamada decides when the room falls quiet.

Stream “Gamachume” HERE