- Two-color front and back screen print on a sandstone, Comfort Colors 6014 Heavyweight Long Sleeve T-shirt
- 6.1 oz, 100% Ring Spun US Cotton
- Female model is 5’7” wearing a size L
- Male model is 5’7” wearing a size M
- The outdoor photos are the most accurate representation of the colors
On all the songs on Only God Was Above Us, “Pravda” might be the album's most complete microcosm, a track where all of the album’s anxieties, self-referentiality and contradictions converge. The song drifts through time with the same dreamlike quality that defines the record, slipping between historic wars and recently shuttered Penn Station tie shops, ancient Russian relatives and modern graffiti tags, as if all eras exist at once. It captures the album’s obsession with the past, which is not viewed as a source of comfort, but as a haunting presence that can’t quite be resolved. Like so many moments on the record, New York becomes both setting and symbol: a city layered with secrets, buried histories, and people who come and go without ever fully arriving.
Ezra Koenig's obsession with the underground comes to a head on the song. When he declares, “I know what lies beneath Manhattan,” it’s a wink toward the album's many references to tunnels, water systems, and electrical grids that shape the city from below. The line reflects the album’s tendency to look downward and inward to dig into what’s beneath the surface of everyday life. “Pravda” positions the narrator as someone who’s aware of these hidden layers, someone who understands that the truth of a place is found in what’s underneath rather than what’s visible.
At the same time, “Pravda” taps into the album’s preoccupation with the subjectivity of truth, which is easily fractured and manipulated by those in power. The song's refrain ("They always ask me about Pravda / It’s just the Russian word for ‘truth’”) shrugs off the grand philosophical claims found earlier on "Classical" and foreshadows the wearied acceptance that runs through "Hope": Truth isn’t transcendent, and when it’s this slippery, letting it go is sometimes the only option.
More than any other song on the album, it foregrounds the record's themes of upward mobility (or lack thereof), and migration, especially the longing to move on even when you don’t know where you’re going. “Pravda” is filled with movement: leaving jobs, leaving cities, leaving relationships, leaving old versions of yourself behind. The repetition of “I’m leaving at the rising of the moon” becomes a quiet assertion of agency in a world that otherwise feels heavy with history’s weight before taking on a decidedly sinister tone in the song's final chorus. “Pravda” is Only God Was Above Us in miniature: restless, reflective, and suspended between what was, what is, and what can never quite be understood.
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