Maria Minerva unearths Plixid, Estonia’s most unlikely lo-fi pop-punk dream.

“Is this punk, girl power, or unknown K‑Pop?” asks Estonian music critic Mart Juur. “No, this is growing up in the 2000s in southern Estonia, where the nearest big city is Otepää. Plixid is a footprint in the sandbox of Estonian pop.” Comprised of four girls from a small village with a population of 33, Plixid came together in the early ’00s under the guidance of their after-school music teacher Guido. Kadri, Tuuli, Signe, and Kaire had known each other since birth and shared a musical connection that was somewhere between chaos and prophecy…

Long before the social media era, the girls performed at punk shows, underground music festivals, and malls. Their sound: a highly addictive lo-fi pop-punk featuring half-sung often spoken (or shouted) vocals, loose garage band drums, and earworm Casio keyboard lines that nearly fall apart as they’re being played. Much like NY post-punk prodigy Chandra or the suburban Cali girl group X-Cetra, Plixid is filled with fun, self-assured teen energy and the sort of indescribable magic that only comes from the world of unlikely and impossible music.

While Plixid dissolved before their songs could be officially released, they did deliver one unforgettable performance on Estonia’s morning TV show, Terevisioon, which is how Estonian-born, LA-based musician Maria Minerva first heard the band. “It just had such great energy. These teenage girls doing avant-garde punk while Kiwa, Fabrique and Erkki Luuk promoted a Cabaret Derrida event. It was hilarious, but the song, their biggest hit ‘Questions,’ was so good. Everyone in Estonia knows the words, even if they don’t know who sang it.”

Now nearly two decades later, Minerva is issuing the long-lost recordings of Plixid via her freshly launched boutique imprint viis. Preserved in their raw, original forms, the mini-album contains recordings from 2005 and 2010 along with remixes from Minerva herself and Estonia’s rising star Ines Daferrari that re-imagine what Plixid’s music might sound like today with contemporary club and hyperpop production. We love Minerva’s dreamy and minimalistic house production which flips Plixid’s “Lifestyle” into a melancholic afters banger.

“Estonian women have been active in the punk since the very moment punk arrived in Estonia in the late 1970s, even if punk has meant different things to them in different decades. Plixid were—and still are—pure riot grrrl! Of course, we needed a band like this then, and we still need one today. Because a girl’s voice should always be heard a little more.”

— Brigitta Davidjants, Bloomsbury 33⅓–published musicologist, punk historian, and researcher at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre