Cruise

Cruise (Kruiz, Russian: Круиз) is a heavy metal band from the former Soviet Union. Created in 1980 as a state-controlled soft rock and pop project, the band achieved great success throughout the USSR before its license to perform and record was revoked in 1984, as part of a brief state crackdown on Western culture. In 1985, founding member and guitarist Valery Gaina reformed the band with an entirely different line-up, in which he himself took on lead vocals. This was followed by a major shift in sound and image, from pop rock to heavy metal. In 1987, the band officially released its debut album, “Kruiz-1,” as a metal band, selling a million legal copies. Outside Russia, the band is best known for its video In Flames, widely aired in the mid-1980s on the Canadian metal show The Power Hour. After releasing its first English-language album in 1988, Kruiz toured extensively in Russia, Europe and North America before splitting up in 1990.

In 1992, all of the founding members except Gaina reformed a non-metal version of the band. Gaina, for his part, organized a one-off reunion of the band's metal line-up in 2016.