Don't care what you say

Don't care how you feel

Get out of my way

'Cause I got a heart of steel

These lines are from the song Heart of Steel, inspired by the battles for Azovstal in Mariupol. It is with this composition that TVORCHI will represent Ukraine at the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 on May 13.

The electronic duo has existed for 6 years, and according to legend, its history began with the song Happy Birthday, which the current vocalist of the band, Jeffrey Kenny, performed on guitar at the birthday party of his stage colleague Andrii Hutsuliak.

Hutsuliak, who has been interested in music since he was 14 years old, heard Kenny sing for the first time and — as he says — fell in love with his voice.

By education, 27-year-old Hutsuliak and 25-year-old Kenny are pharmacists. They studied at the Ternopil Medical University, where Jeffrey came from Nigeria. But none of them worked in their specialty.

"Music is all our work," says the vocalist.

This year's winning Eurovision selection was preceded by six years of the TVORCHI project, during which the duo released four albums and a dozen individual singles.

But the moment when almost all of Ukraine learned about the band was the national selection for Eurovision 2020.

Then TVORCHI took the stage with the song Bonfire, which was dedicated to the environmental problems in the world and the responsibility that people bear for this. In the final of the national selection, the duo took fourth place out of six. And the winner was the band Go-A, which managed to get to Eurovision in one year because in 2020 the competition was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the loss at the national selection, the band firmly established itself on the Ukrainian music scene. Starting from 2020, TVORCHI has been consistently nominated for music awards and won: both as "Best Artist", and "Best Pop Group", and as creators of "Best Album" and "Best Concert Show".

In 2023, despite the continuation of the full-scale war with Russia, Ukraine, as the winning country of Eurovision 2022, held another national selection for the song contest.

TVORCHI, who according to the results of the judges' vote were inferior only to the bandurist Maryna Krut, won the selection with a margin of 10,000 audience votes.

"I like that this is new Ukrainian music. It's very familiar European, very high-quality music. It's very modern. The most stylish band," Yuliya Sanina from The Hardkiss, a member of the jury of the national selection, said about the duo's performance at the time.

The song Heart of Steel, which TVORCHI will perform on the stage of Eurovision 2023, is inspired by the defenders of Azovstal, who held the defense of Mariupol for more than three months in the spring of 2022.

Jeffrey Kenny, who wrote the lyrics to the song, says that in wartime he didn't want to play the sympathy card with his text: "Our song is about strength and indomitable spirit."