How Tired Cossack Survived the Noise

Backstage at a packed Winnipeg release show for the post-punk outfit's latest LP ZIMA.

By Myles Tiessen

Photos by Mike Thiessen

Published on May 25, 2026

Stephen Levko Halas is on stage, shirtless, sweating like a long-distance runner, and spitting water into the air like a busted fire hydrant on a sweltering summer afternoon. It’s the end of a long set for Tired Cossack, and the frontman is still hyperkinetic, exercising toe touch jumps as if gravity doesn’t exist and screaming the lyrics to their call-and-response encore “Dollywood.”

The Winnipeg-based post-punk band just held the release show for their third LP, ZIMA, in their hometown, a night that packed the West End Cultural Centre. The crowd has already had a month to live with these new songs since ZIMA came out, and the air of excitement feels suffocating as crowds line up at the door to, strangely enough, get the inside of their palms stamped by an elderly man with a lanyard around his neck that says “VOLUNTEER.”

ZIMA, likewise, is full of energy and anticipation. The songs blitz through a crunchy, chaotic atmosphere surrounded by tones of post-punk and shoegaze. It’s an album filled with the balanced dualism of darkness and radiance, and Levko Halas brings a harsh beauty to music, one that feels both despondent and miraculously hopeful. His understated, buoyant melodies suspend the bleak lyrics that occasionally break through the noise.

“My mind’s decayed… Feel my heart breaking, and I’ll waste away… Every desperate loser’s told to seize the day,” bubble to the surface of “Cab” like a thick sludge.

At 7:30 P.M., a few short hours before Tired Cossack takes the stage, Levko Halas is sitting in the green room in the basement of the WECC with his partner Jodi Plenert and brother Frank Halas, both of whom play in the band.

“I was stressed about [the show] until today and then realized the pre-sales were good,” Levko Halas says. “It’s gonna be packed. I think it was like the last time I checked it, there were only 50 tickets left at the door.”

Although infectious and tuneful, the thematic thread of dread, decay and anxiety oozes from ZIMA in a way that’s impossible to ignore, and Levko Halas says ZIMA came as a response to his recent battle with cancer.

“There were days when I couldn’t do anything. Especially the treatments were so brutal that, like, for three or four days, I just lay in bed. I couldn’t watch TV, I couldn’t see because the fucking meds swelled me up so much that they squeezed my eyes [shut],” Levko Halas says.

“It’s always extreme. I was extremely nauseous, I was extremely hungry, and I was never comfortable.”

Even while he was poisoned by treatment and his cells were dying, Levko Halas made music like it was an impulse, finding a way to chronicle his distress for himself and his family.

For Frank, who was living in Nova Scotia at the time, sharing demos was a way he says he felt an “emotional connection” to his brother while he was across the country. Working on music together, he says, was the way he could directly support his brother beyond a superficial wellness check-in over the phone.

To Plenert, witnessing her partner express what he was going through felt like a form of purification. “You can really get the depth of what he was actually feeling and to see him be able to, like you know, for lack of a better term, exercise those demons… while [ZIMA] has these aggressive and angry and dark elements, it’s also so beautiful because it’s this thing that we’ve gone through together as a family,” says Plenert.

It’s not long before the first opening band, SPEEDREADER, announces they’re heading on stage and Tired Cossack agree to meet back up for a photoshoot between sets once the rest of their band arrives. Levko Halas ties up his Adidas boxing shoes, jumps up, gives a few air punches, checks to make sure his back T-shirt is properly inside-out, and finally zips on a faded 90s track jacket.

As a member of the Ukrainian diaspora, Levko Halas infuses all of his music with his familial heritage. Songs often draw on Ukrainian folklore, artwork proudly showcases Ukrainian-influenced paintings, and, even though he didn’t grow up with it, Levko-Halas often sings in the language his Baba spoke.

While the photographer stages the band behind the venue, Levko-Halas non-chalantly says he used Google Translate to change his lyrics from English. “I used to feel pressure to get things ‘right’ because I was holding myself as Ukrainian, which has a distinct meaning in Winnipeg and a set of spoken and unspoken expectations.”

In a way, ZIMA and its meditations on the self and mortality enabled Levko Halas to celebrate his Ukrainian identity without restrictions.

“I wanted to take my cultural identity into the present and not worry about any of that. I didn’t even check if my grammar was right in ZIMA.”

The other opening band, Prairie, finish their set with a knotty garage-punk song, and shortly thereafter, the night’s MC gets onstage to introduce Tired Cossack. “Whose ready to get feral?” is the only line that breaks through the crowd’s noisy expectancy.

Wielding two drum kits (a last-minute decision made during soundcheck), the headliners launch into the cold, reverberant “Tentacles,” a haunting track made all the more phantasmic backed with projections of lo-fi scenery documenting Winnipeg’s industrial decay.

It’s not long before the show gets properly rowdy. The band trades the undiluted darkness of songs from ZIMA for the rollicking playfulness of 2023’s I Know, I Guess. Levko Halas loses the track jacket, a light mosh begins to form, and a couple of guys in the crowd share hits of a weed pen, exhaling down into their shirts.

It’s a particularly heavy, guitar forward set; post-punk minus the punk. After a particularly tangled guitar solo on “Crusher,” Levko Halas yells at the crowd: “That was the hardest guitar solo I’ve actually ever played. Take that, Dad, I’m a better guitar player than you.” For the thunderous shoegaze track, “Heaven,” the band brought Adam Soloway (Living Hour, Central Heat Exchange) onstage for a particularly deafening cut. “One and done,” whispers Soloway backstage, brushing off the muted vocals, “It’s shoegaze.”

There was a time when Levko Halas thought he might not ever get to play music again, and Tired Cossack’s finale saw him drinking in all the exhaustive, euphoric adrenaline of the night. Now, shirtless, he haphazardly stumbles and jumps around, minimally avoiding tangling himself in XLR cords, screaming as if vocals no longer exist after this night.

Tired Cossack is gearing up for festival season, playing shows at newly minted Way Out Fest in August and Prairie Wind Music Festival at the start of June. Those shows, undoubtedly, will carry the raucous energy the band brings to each of their shows. But perhaps, this release show is in its own way, a distinct celebration of everything that makes up ZIMA.

“Zima” translates to “winter.” Winter – especially in Winnipeg – will come again. For now, it’s spring.