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Some tracks you have to push. This one didn’t need pushing.
“Chubina” started small. Three guys from Georgia, Levan Bantsadze, Giorgi Matkava, and Mamuka Matkava, recording remotely on a single iPhone 6. No label. No plan. No budget. Early 2024 they put it out and kind of just let it sit.
Then it moved. Word of mouth, mostly. Nobody forced it across borders, it just went. Shazam’s Global Top 200, that happened. iTunes Top 20 too, in the US, the UK, Germany, other places. And Spotify? The streams blew past 130 million and didn’t stop. Kingsmen, the band’s label, now puts it well over 150.
That’s the backstory. Now the new thing.
What “Chubina Chill” actually is
“Chubina Chill” is the slowed, ambient cut of the original. Came out this past November. Same bones, way softer pulse. Where the original carries that sharp folk edge, the chill version just breathes.
The melody still leans on old Georgian folk. Polyphonic stuff, the panduri, ancient material reworked into something cinematic and minimal. East Duo don’t museum-piece the tradition. They stretch it. And the chill version stretches it further, letting the whole thing sit in the quiet.
Beautiful piece of music!
The Tskaltubo session
Here’s the part worth your time.
They filmed a live session in Tskaltubo. Don’t know it? It’s a town out west in Georgia. Famous for one thing mostly. These massive Soviet-era sanatoriums, all of them abandoned now. Crumbling halls. Broken light. Plants growing where the floor used to be. East Duo set up and played “Chubina Chill” right inside one of those ruins.
Here is a link for the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhbcp_C9zJM
Barely any visuals to speak of. No flash, no effects pile-on. Just light cutting through the dark, dust in the air, the three of them playing. And it lands because it matches the song. Decay and stillness and something that used to be grand. You feel it before you can explain it.
Could’ve been a gimmick. It isn’t. The location does half the emotional work and the band carries the rest.
Why this one travels
Most of East Duo’s stuff is instrumental. No lyrics to translate, no language wall. A kid in Brazil and a kid in Germany hear the same thing. That’s a big reason “Chubina” spread the way it did, and it’s why the chill version is racking up plays on TikTok and YouTube too. People keep grabbing it for edits, slowed loops, anime cuts, all of it.
Since signing with Kingsmen, they’ve gotten more disciplined about the whole operation. Six new releases lined up for 2026, apparently. The accident turned into a practice.
Anyway. Go watch the Tskaltubo session. Full screen, lights low. Some songs explain themselves better than any writeup can, and this is one of them.
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/5YDPJiBmZ4A5JgFvSM7pM9?si=2a799bc0f00349fe
