ARTBAT

The career, by era

Before ARTBAT

Kryvenko and Limarenko did not arrive at their partnership as beginners. In a 2017 interview, they said both had spent nearly a decade DJing separately across Kyiv, moving between underground rooms, afterparties and beach clubs. That experience gave ARTBAT a practical foundation: two artists who already understood how different crowds responded over the course of a night. ⁴

They met at a Kyiv club and quickly moved into the studio. The dates differ slightly across the record—one account places the meeting in late 2014, while a later profile dates their decision to join forces to 2015—but the shape of the story is consistent. Shared musical ideas became studio sessions, the sessions became joint gigs, and the partnership held because each member trusted the other’s judgment. ¹⁵⁶

The duo described themselves as working almost like a single organism. Both brought ideas, questioned the track in progress and listened for what felt right rather than dividing the work into fixed roles. Their studio was small, and their purpose was direct: make records that would give something back to the dancefloor. ⁴

The climb becomes visible

The first sign that the project could travel beyond Kyiv came with Mandrake. Apple Music’s profile records support from Richie Hawtin, followed by releases on labels including Diynamic and Watergate. It was an early form of circulation that mattered in dance music: a track moving through influential DJ sets before the artists behind it were widely known. ²

By the end of 2017, that circulation had become easier to see. An interview from that December reported that ARTBAT’s recent Diynamic and Suara releases had climbed toward the top of Beatport’s charts, while four appearances at Pacha and Destino in Ibiza were lined up. The duo were still speaking from their Kyiv base and describing their CHI by Decadence residency, but the rooms and labels around them had changed. ⁴

Touring fed the next round of music. Kryvenko and Limarenko said gigs, travel and performance supplied ideas, which they carried back into the studio and tested against a simple question: would the track work for people in a club? This was less a grand theory than a repeatable loop—play, observe, return, revise. As the bookings widened, so did the range of dancefloors informing the records. ⁷⁴

2019

The scattered markers became a clear career threshold in 2019. ARTBAT were playing major clubs and festivals, recording a BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix and performing for Cercle above Rio de Janeiro. Beatport named them its top-selling artists of the year. Each marker reached a different audience: DJs buying records, radio listeners following the Essential Mix, and viewers encountering the duo through Cercle’s spectacular visual frame. ¹

For ARTBAT, the Essential Mix carried the deepest personal weight. They had listened to the series for years and understood the invitation as recognition—a sign that the work had crossed into a lineage they respected. International success also gave their Ukrainian identity a larger stage. They spoke openly about wanting to represent their country and pull more attention toward its electronic scene. ¹

Building Upperground

ARTBAT launched Upperground in 2021. After years of releasing through other imprints, the label gave the duo a durable frame around their own work and the artists they chose to present alongside it. Its public catalogue includes ARTBAT releases such as Dance and Afterparty, while the road-to-studio loop continued: even at a larger scale, the duo still described gigs as a source of ideas. ⁷⁸²⁹

That structure matters because ARTBAT’s music is built for collective response. Upperground did more than attach a name to individual releases; it placed the duo’s peak-time instincts inside a recurring label identity. The project that began as two DJs testing ideas in a small Kyiv studio now had a platform capable of extending beyond either record. ⁸²

Precision and friction

The 2022 Our Space EP with Dino Lenny shows the range inside that dancefloor focus. A contemporary review heard emotional, hypnotic drums and synths across the collaboration, then separated the two tracks by feel: the title track deep and cavernous, Keep Calm crisper, with shadowed vocals, rumbling bass and a breakdown built to release into the drop. ¹⁰

The same strengths can harden into predictability. Reviewing ARTBAT and Vintage Culture’s 2025 single She The Last One, Unmixed praised its layered synths, hypnotic bassline, emotional breakdown and peak-time payoff, but also found the arrangement familiar. The track delivers its tension and release with control; the listener can also hear the machinery arriving on schedule. ³

ARTBAT’s arc is not simply a story of getting bigger. It is a story of accumulated club knowledge: years spent DJing separately, a partnership organized around crowd response, records that opened an international circuit, and a label built to sustain it. Their next artistic problem is already contained in that success—how to keep the precision that made the project work without letting the method become too easy to predict.