In Estonia, the weather isn’t background noise. It’s narrative. The long, dim winters tighten your world into a kind of tunnel vision. The brief, ecstatic summers feel like a reward for having made it through. And in between, during those awkward and indecisive weeks of spring or autumn, you get stuck in limbo. One day it’s T-shirt weather; the next, you’re digging out your winter coat again. You leave the house with confidence and return damp, cold, and full of existential doubt. That inevitably shapes how people behave, how they write, how they make music.

So maybe it wasn’t by chance that when we met Ann-Lisett Rebane and Katariina Kivi, the two minds and four hands behind Duo Ruut, Tallinn was caught in one of those very Estonian mood swings. It was early April during Tallinn Music Week. After a couple of freakishly warm days when temperatures had climbed close to 20 degrees, snow had fallen overnight, sending festival-goers back into scarves and boots, weaving through puddles and ghost-traced tramlines in Telliskivi.

By late morning, the chill had softened. Once a stretch of Soviet-era factories, the district now pulses with contemporary art galleries, kombucha cafés, craft breweries, pop-up record shops and late-night improv jams. The kind of place where the weather feels like part of the curation.

We were backstage at the Club of Different Rooms, sipping coffee on one of the venue’s chubby, vintage sofas while Duo Ruut quietly prepared for their sold-out showcase. A few hours later, the crowd would begin to file in barefoot, as is custom at the venue, until the space was packed wall to wall. Shoulders brushing, people cross-legged on the wooden floor, standing between furniture, sitting wherever they could find room: stools, chairs, sofas. The audience was mostly local, but the set was delivered in English, as if already preparing itself for export.

Backstage, the energy matched the setting: calm, focused, a little improvised. “Should I, like, say who we are as well, or does it not matter that much?” Ann-Lisett asked, half-serious, as the recorder clicked on.

At the time, Ilmateade – The Weather Report, the aptly titled, oddly inevitable second full-length album by Duo Ruut, was nearing completion. The duo were in the final stretch of a long, thoughtful process, putting the finishing touches on a record that had been quietly brewing for four years. “The album’s coming out in June…probably when the interview goes out too.” said Ann-Lisett, checking herself mid-thought.

Fast forward a few months, and the contrast is as stark as an Estonian season change. The album is out, released a few days ago (12 June), and Duo Ruut are about to perform at no less than Glastonbury (26, 27 and 28 June) and Roskilde (2 July), two of Europe’s most iconic festivals. From the first time they sat across a shared zither in high school to some of the world’s biggest stages, the shift feels surreal. And yet, everything they do still feels grounded in something quiet, deliberate and unmistakably theirs.

“Our new album is called The Weather Report – in Estonian, Ilma Teade – and it’s our second LP,” debuted Ann-Lisett. “We’ve had one full album and one EP before this, and it’s full of songs we’re really excited to share.”

The title might seem deliberate, but it wasn’t entirely planned. “It was kind of a joke at first,” she continued. “We’d say, ‘Oh, let’s call the album The Weather Report,’ because it sounded so silly in the beginning. But in the end, it made sense, it has a meaning behind it.”

“Yeah, as time went on and we were making the songs, we started to realise that most of the songs talk about the weather,” Katariina added. “Which is, I think, a very Estonian thing as well…”

The name only came once everything else was in place. “The title came as one of the last things, I would say,” Katariina explained. “When all the songs were ready. It wasn’t decided beforehand to write songs about the weather, but…”

It turns out album’s theme also surfaced on its own, gradually and without planning. “The album consists of songs that we’ve written over the last four-ish years,” said Ann-Lisett. “And during that time, the weather just kept showing up, maybe because it’s always there, shaping how we feel, even if we don’t realise it.”

That timeline stretches back to 2019, when Duo Ruut released their debut LP Tuule Sõnad, followed by the Kulla Kerguseks EP in 2021. “Quite soon after the release of the EP, we started writing this album,” Katariina recalled. “It’s like a collection of all the places we have been in the last four, five years.”

The songs, scattered across time and geography, slowly gathered into shape. “I would say the first ideas of different songs have come from many, many different places,” Ann-Lisett added. “One idea came to us in a soundcheck in a small town in Portugal. One song we wrote for our sound engineer’s wedding. And so it’s like a collection of our moods and memories and travels and experiences.”

That sensitivity to mood runs throughout Duo Ruut’s music. Some songs are lyrical, others simply hang in a certain emotional atmosphere. “We have a few songs on this album that aren’t about anything in particular,” Ann-Lisett noted. “We just wanted to capture a certain mood or feeling.”

“Sometimes it’s not really about the weather itself,” Katariina agreed, “but about how you react to it, what kind of feelings it brings out. For example, we literally sing about rain, but it’s more about the emotion the music carries than the rain itself.”

And while the weather, or rather, how we experience and respond to it, may be the thread running through the album, the original idea was broader. “When we started to write music for this album, our initial idea was to make it about growing up,” reflected Katariina. “Because when we found and started playing this instrument [the kannel], we were in high school. And we still didn’t know how to play it correctly… Actually, we still play it in a weird way.”

She went on, “We were in high school, just figuring out what we wanted to do. Then we released the first album, then the EP. And now, at the age we’re at, it feels like we’re developing so much, growing, and so much is happening”.

Ann-Lisett picked up the thread. “I feel that idea is still present. Like Katariina said, all the songs were written over those five years. And during that time, we’ve grown a lot. Even the techniques we use on the instrument have become more interesting, because we’re more familiar with it.”

They’ve grown with it. That shared kennel, a modified Estonian zither usually played flat between them, remains the basis of Duo Ruut’s sound. The music remains stripped back, but it carries more weight now. There’s a sharper sense of direction, and their expressive range has quietly widened.

“For us, it’s almost like a musical photo album,” Ann-Lisett reflected. “Of course the listener won’t understand a hundred percent what those songs mean to us, but for us, it’s really fun to look back. Each song connects to a different moment, a different period or era.”

Despite that personal layer, the album still holds together as a unified whole. “It’s not in chronological order,” Katariina explained. “But when we had all the material laid out, we looked at it and realised: oh my god, it’s all about the weather. Even though we wrote it over a long stretch of time, it somehow feels like a really good… how would you say… tervik. A whole.”

Ann-Lisett nodded. “It all fits together really naturally. And the track list more or less follows the seasons. We start in winter, move through spring and summer, and end in autumn. It just settled that way, like a cycle coming full circle.”

Now that The Weather Report is finally out in the world, how should listeners approach it?  “We’d really recommend listening from beginning to end, in the order we picked out,” Katariina replied, without hesitation. “So you can feel the changing of the seasons, and how the weather impacts our emotions and how we feel.”

The idea runs deeper than sequencing. Mood, temperature, and emotional shifts are built into the music’s fabric. “We’ve come to realise just how much it shapes the way people behave here in Estonia.” Ann-Lisett observed. “In winter, no one smiles. Everyone’s just trying to get from one place to another as quickly as possible. No time for small talk: it’s too cold”. She paused, then smiled. “And then a few days ago it was really warm, and suddenly everyone was out having picnics, smiling. We’ve really tried to capture that contrast. Even the gloomy days, we wanted to reflect those feelings too. It’s important to feel them.”

One of the most intriguing elements of The Weather Report is how it opens up Duo Ruut’s introspective soundworld to other voices. The album includes three collaborations, all with Estonian artists, each appearing like a sudden change in weather: subtle, surprising, and precisely placed.

By the time the record was released, the full list of guests had been revealed. But when we spoke in April, just before the launch, only one name was allowed to be mentioned. “We can’t expose all of them just yet,” said Katariina with a grin. “At least two should be surprises, but we can say one name, and describe the others a little bit.”

That name was Eik, a poet and rapper with whom both Katariina and Ann-Lisett share a long personal history.

“We actually grew up together,” said Ann-Lisett. “When Katariina and I were in first grade, Eik was in our class too.”

Katariina picked up the thread. “We went through the most awkward teenage years together! Same friend group. We knew each other well when Duo Ruut was starting, and Eik had already begun earlier than us.”

“He’s sort of a poet-slash-rapper,” Ann-Lisett explained. “It’s more like spoken word. Art-hop. Very poetic. Not straight hip-hop.”

Katariina nodded in agreement. “He was a huge inspiration to me personally. He was bold and brave enough to share his work publicly at such a young age, even though teenage friends can be pretty brutal. That courage really encouraged me to start creating my own music.”

Their collaboration had been years in the making, even if it hadn’t happened until now.

“It felt very natural to do something together,” said Ann-Lisett. “We’d talked about it many times before, but it never happened.”

“Our paths just diverged after high school,” Katariina added. “We didn’t see each other often, though of course we’d say hi if we bumped into one another. But we weren’t in close contact.”

Then came the message from Eik. “He actually reached out to us,” Ann-Lisett recalled. “He said, ‘I’ve been thinking, maybe we should do a song together.’ And we were like — yes! Finally. The timing was perfect.”

The result is a track that lands somewhere around August in the album’s imagined seasonal cycle: late summer, dusk, the kind of evening that holds onto its warmth.

“It’s a song in Estonian,” Katariina pointed out. “And I’d say it captures the end of summer. August. The lyrics are about the evening. It wonders where the sun goes when it sleeps, where is the sun’s home?” she continued. “And Eik added his own verse, his own voice. It gives the song a more modern edge, without being too heavy. It’s like a reflection on who we are.”

Ann-Lisett leaned into the mood. “For me, it sounds like a very late summer night. End of August. Still warm in the city… On our last EP,” she recalled, “we had a song about knowing when it’s time to go home. But this one feels like the opposite: when it’s the right time to not go home, to just stay out and enjoy the night.”

She summed it up simply: “It’s really about that feeling. Trying to describe that specific, fleeting mood.”

As for the other two collaborations, they were still under wraps when we spoke. What the duo could share, though, already hinted at a carefully curated sense of chemistry. “One of them is an instrumentalist we’ve always admired deeply,” Katariina revealed. “It’s someone we’ve dreamed of working with since the beginning.”

That someone turned out to be Erki Pärnoja, the Estonian multi-instrumentalist and guitarist in the art-pop group Ewert and The Two Dragons.

“We finally have a track with him,” Ann-Lisett shared. “And we’re so excited because it sounds exactly like we imagined it would — like Duo Ruut meets this artist. It was such a surreal feeling.”

She reflected on how unlikely the collaboration had once seemed. “At first, the idea of working with him felt so far away, like something impossible. But he turned out to be super chill, and everything came together really smoothly. We’re just incredibly happy to have this track on the album.”

Then there’s the third guest—or rather, guests. Less dream collaborators, more kindred spirits. “It’s with a very fun Estonian band,” disclosed Katariina.

That band is Puuluup, the self-described “zombie-folk” duo known for mixing the talharpa (a traditional bowed lyre) with loop pedals and a dry, absurdist sense of humour.

“Yeah!” exclaimed Ann-Lisett. “The track we made together is just full of joy. The idea came about so naturally. They’re a group we kept bumping into all over Europe. Playing at the same festivals. Eventually, it just felt right to make something together.”

“People have always compared us, in a way,” Katariina added. “We’re similar in some aspects and total opposites in others, but in a good way. It’s a cool dynamic. So we’re really pleased we got to work with them.”

By this point, it’s clear: The Weather Report isn’t just about climate; it’s about community. And in Estonia’s tight-knit, collaborative music scene, these kinds of connections feel almost inevitable.

“Estonia is like a small village, really,” Ann-Lisett reflected. “If you don’t know someone personally, there’s only one person between you who does. It’s not just Tallinn. It’s the whole country. There are only about 1.3 million people in Estonia.”

“And the music scene reflects that,” Katariina continued. “You come to Tallinn Music Week and everyone is here. You hear so many acts and cross paths with so many musicians. But it’s not just an Estonian thing. Across Europe, there’s this spirit of collaboration. You go to a festival, see someone play and think, we should work with them.”

“Last year, for example,” Ann-Lisett recalled, “we had a show on the same night as this Norwegian-Swedish band. We instantly clicked and became long-distance friends. They actually played here at Tallinn Music Week too,” she noted. “And people were saying they remind me of Duo Ruut. So who knows, maybe there’s something for the future…”

“Nothing confirmed yet, and not for this album,” Katariina clarified. “But we’d love to work with them. Performing abroad has really opened up these kinds of opportunities.”

That openness to connection, to collaboration, to surprise, isn’t just a creative strategy. It’s a cultural one.

“One thing about Estonia being such a tight-knit community of musicians,” Ann-Lisett pointed out, “is that for us, and I’ve heard others say the same, when you’re starting out as a young musician, it’s… I wouldn’t say easy, because it’s never easy. But it’s doable.”

“Exactly,” agreed Katariina. “There’s this culture of young people doing a lot from a very early stage. Like with this album, the production is by Backstage Records, and they started so young. They just decided, let’s make live music videos, let’s buy some equipment.”

“And people just accepted it,” Ann-Lisett continued. “In Estonia, it’s normal for young people to do things at a professional level. No one’s saying, you’re too young to be part of this. There’s a lot of trust in younger artists, which really makes a difference when you’re starting out.”

“Older musicians don’t really look down on the younger ones either,” she concluded. “It’s more supportive than competitive. They want to help, to encourage you, and to keep the standard high.”

So much of Duo Ruut’s identity has been shaped not just by Estonia itself, but by the act of carrying Estonia with them, on tour, in interviews, on stage, in the way they frame their music. When asked why so many Estonian musicians are starting to make waves internationally, Katariina offered a candid reflection. “I think it’s to do with our collective need to prove ourselves, to put Estonia on the map. We’re a small country, and that’s part of our identity.”

Ann-Lisett agreed. “Yeah, and a lot of Estonian artists really want people to know we’re from Estonia. If you’re from a big country, it might not matter so much. But for us, it’s almost like a mission.”

“Not just where we’re from,” Katariina continued, “but also what it’s like here. We’re always explaining: ‘We’re from Northern Europe, we’ve got the sea, the forests, the weather…’”

Ann-Lisett laughed. “We really end up being kind of like cultural ambassadors, constantly filling people in about Estonia because many still don’t know where it is or what it’s like.”

There’s structural support behind it too. Katariina pointed out, “We’ve had really good managers helping us with music export. That’s a huge part of it.”

The music pulls its weight too. “The kind of folk-meets-world sound we do really travels,” Ann-Lisett noted. “It fits into all sorts of settings, not just folk festivals. We’ve played really varied events. That’s been true for other Estonian acts too, like Puuluup, Mari Kalkun…”

“There’s a new wave coming through as well,” Katariina chimed in. “Puuluup and Mari Kalkun are already well established, and Trad.Attack! are wrapping up something new. We’ll probably be hearing more from them soon. We were kind of at the start of that surge in younger traditional bands in Estonia. A lot of others came up around the same time as us.”

Ann-Lisett recalled, “Just yesterday I was listening to a showcase at the Folktronica stage, and discovered a duo called Kuula Hetke, a kind of electronic/flute improvisational duo rooted in Estonian traditional melodies. They’re doing something really interesting. Quite electronic, very improvisational, but still grounded in tradition. I think they’ve got real potential to find their niche, not just in Estonia but in the European and wider world music scene.”

Back on The Weather Report, one subtle but deliberate decision shaped the way the record opens and closes. “This is the first album where we’ve included both an intro and an outro,” explained Ann-Lisett. “It might seem like a small thing as they’re not full songs, but we’re really happy with how they frame the album.”

Katariina agreed. “Definitely listen to the whole thing from start to finish — intro and outro included. Especially the intro. It’s exactly how I always imagined our next album should begin. Those first notes feel like a magical moment to me. And our last release, the EP, really worked as a bridge into this one.”

Ann-Lisett picked up the thread. “Actually, maybe people should listen to the first album, then the EP, and then this one. If you listen to the final track of the EP before the intro of the new album, there’s a little Easter egg, like a connecting thread.”

Now that the album is finally out, they’re taking it back on the road. “Yes!” exclaimed Katariina. “We’ve got quite a few gigs this summer, and a big moment for us is performing at Roskilde Festival in Denmark.”

Ann-Lisett saw it as a turning point. “It’s a huge step forward for us! We’re thrilled to present the new album there. Definitely one of the most exciting things happening this summer. And of course, we’ll be playing in Estonia too. One of our favourite stages is at Viljandi Folk Festival.”

“That one is always special,” confirmed Katariina. “It’s just as important as playing abroad. You have to stay connected to your roots, to the audience that was there from the beginning.”

It might seem counterintuitive for music so intimate to work on massive festival stages, but it does. “Our music is definitely intimate,” said Katariina, “but surprisingly, it has worked with bigger audiences too. We’ve played in small cosy settings and large festivals, and somehow it still connects.”

“At Viljandi Folk last year, we were blown away by the turnout,” remembered Ann-Lisett. “The energy was totally different from the seated indoor shows we usually do, but just as intense. That crowd, our first and longest supporters, have been behind us all the way. So we always bring something extra for them: a fresh track, a story they haven’t heard, or something special.”

Katariina laughed. “Like our merch! Last year was the first time we had proper merch, and we designed it with our home audience in mind. They’re like a huge group of friends, really.”

That community spirit, whether on stage, off stage or between songs, isn’t just a side-effect of Estonia’s size. It’s something they’ve actively held onto, even as their reach grows internationally. “Keeping that balance matters to us,” Katariina reflected. “Travel internationally, come home regularly. It keeps us anchored.”

And what about the future? Do they see a clear path ahead?

“We’re figuring it out as we go,” Ann-Lisett admitted. “When we started, we didn’t think it would last. We picked up the instrument for a single concert, enjoyed it, but didn’t see the potential. Then we picked it up again, and it grew. And we’ve just kept doing what feels right: writing music we’d want to listen to, giving our best in performances, meeting people, and seeing where it takes us.”

“We never had a set path,” confirmed Katariina. “And we still don’t. But we had a promise from the start: we’d do this as long as we enjoy it 100%. And we still do,” she smiled. “It’s been about eight years since we began, preparing for a festival contest. That’s where it all started.”

When asked how they’d describe The Weather Report to someone hearing it for the first time, Ann-Lisett didn’t hesitate. “It’s a journey, through the year, through our minds.”

“It’s about growing up,” said Katariina. “We wrote it in those formative years, in our early twenties. It’s a reflection of time passing and the moods that come with it.”

Ann-Lisett nodded. “A small compilation of what it might feel like to be Estonian. Or to be us. Or even to be living here 100 years ago. It’s a mixture of all of that.”

Ilmateade (The Weather Report), Duo Ruut's second album, was released on 12 June.
You can stream, listen to it, or fully experience Estonian weather by picking up a copy HERE