About
Biography
SunStroke Project was formed in 2007 by 2 young men from Tiraspol who were doing their military service. Initially it consisted of violinist Anton Ragoza and saxophonist Serghei Stepanov.
Anton Ragoza entered the music school at the age of 14. He finished highschool but did not get any higher education, because Anton soon left college and joined the army, where he played in the orchestra.
In the army he met the saxophonist Sergei Stepanov. After getting to know each other, the idea of creating a musical band appeared, and its name came about as a result of a funny situation. One summer when the soldiers were doing some work in the fields, the young blond Anton Ragoza got heatstroke, from which he got the name “SunStroke”.
After the military service, the band SunStroke Project, together with soloist Pasha Parfeni, played in clubs, especially in Tiraspol and Odesa. Once in Odessa they met MC Mîslic who suggested them to come to Chisinau and try their hand at the Moldovan market.
The band easily conquered the Moldovan public, already in 2009 taking the 3rd place in the national preselection for Eurovision with the song “No Crime”.
After the departure of Pasha Parfeni from the band, he was replaced by Serghei Ialovițchii from Chisinau, with whom SunStroke Project won the national preselection for the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest, together with Olia Tira. The group reached the final and became 22nd there. With the virtuoso performance of the band’s saxophonist (Sergei Stepanov) at Eurovision, he became an internet phenomenon called “Epic Sax Guy”. Remixed clips of his performance have garnered millions of views on YouTube. Several versions of “10 Hours of Epic Sax Guy” have also been created, with the first two most popular of them accumulating 16 million and 10 million views respectively.
In 2012, Olia Tira and Sunstroke Project submitted a song to the national final for the Eurovision Song Contest. However, the song, “Superman” was not selected.
In 2013, the band performed a song in Romanian for the first time, “Ce Bine Imi Pare”. For this song, they teamed up with the Alex Calancea Band. In the same year, the song “Walking in the rain” took the 1st place on the Radio Record chart and became the anthem of the Parapaparam KVN team of MGIMO Moscow. In the same year, a video was shot for the song “Amor”, which was released in English and Spanish.
In 2015, Sunstroke Project took part in the national finalof the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 with the song “Day After Day”, but took 3rd place in the final. In August of the same year, the Sunstroke project opened their music label Ragoza Music and released a new song “Not Giving It Up”.
In February 2017, they won the national final for the Eurovision Song Contest 2017 with the song “Hey, Mamma!”. In the final of the competition, they took 3rd place, which was the best result of Moldova at that time. Upon the return of the team to Moldova, the President of the country presented the highest state awards of Moldova to the members of the group – the Order of Honor, and their producer Dmitry Sergeev – the medal “Civil Merit”.
In 2018, the band teamed up with the Swiss group Timebelle to record the song “Tocame”.
In February 2019, the founder and violinist Anton Ragoza left the band. Their first recording as a duo was the song “Boomerang”, followed by “Mango”.
Although the band released new music, due to COVID19 the new video, containing the song “Pepperoni”, was only released in November 2020. In April 2021, a song in Russian came out, “Beloye”, followed in December by “Netflix & chill”.
In 2022, Sunstroke Project had an international tour called the Epic Sunstroke Project Euro Tour. They went to Barcelona, Amsterdam, Turin and Warsaw, mostly for Eurovision related performances. In 2023, the band participated once again in the Moldovan national final with the song “Yummy Mommy” and placed second
