Led by Albert Kuvezin, Yat-Kha merge traditional khoomei throat singing with more contemporary rock and punk. Khoomei is a style of singing endemic to the band's native Tuva (the smallest and remotest republic in the Russian federation), which allows the singer to hold more than one note simultaneously. Vocalists produce a drone as well as its harmonic, which is transformed into a melody.
When Kuvezin began making music in his home-town, bands had to be vetted by Communist Party officials. According to reports, Kuvezin's initial experiments in music making were rejected for reasons including failure to stick to Communist ideology, the length of their hair and the fact that they did not play enough waltzes. Kuvezin was a founding member of Tuvan group Huun-Huur-Tu. Although he had studied classical guitar and bass at music college, Kuvezin believed the band's style to be too folkloric in the context of a glasnost-induced punk rock explosion. After Huun-Huur-Tu, Kuvezin initially recorded Antropofagia, an experimental electro-Tuvan album with Andrei Sokolovsky. Founded in 1991, Yat-Kha was intended to reflection Kuvezin's roots in Tuvan music but also the recent history of Russia, alongside inspirations such as Deep Purple and Sonic Youth. The ever-changing line-up has included Zhenya Tkachov (vocals/percussion), Aldyn-ool Sevek (vocals/igil), Alexei Saaia (vocals/morinhuur), Radik Tiuliush (vocals/igil), Evgeniy Tkachev (vocals/drums), Mikhail "Mahmoud' Skripaltschchikov (bass), and Sailyk Ommun (vocals/yat-kha). Yat-Kah's first release available outside Russia was 1995"s Yenisei-Punk (Yenesei being the "great river" in Tuva), an album recorded live to two-track. The follow-up, Dalai Beldiri, was issued by Wicklow (Chieftains' Paddy Moloney's label). The band's third release, Aldyn Dashka (The Golden Cup), was released via Yat-Kha's own label.
In 2002, Yat-Kha won a UK BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music in the category for the Asia/Pacific region. A year later, the band released tuva.rock, an album recorded with Paul Corkett, a producer who had previously worked with Placebo, Nick Cave and the Cure. The album combined both old and new tracks including arrangements of traditional songs, staples of the band's live set and specifically recorded tracks. Live performances to coincide with the release prompted comparison to a "terrifying oriental death metal band". The album reflected the band's increasing eschewal of traditional costume and "pure" traditional music, while their occasional use of English vocals suggested hopes of wider acceptance. In the same year, the band provided an improvised soundtrack to Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1928 Soviet film Storm Over Asia: The Heir Of Genghis Khan, notably performing that soundtrack at the Barbican's X-Bloc Reunion festival in London. The print of the film was apparently restored specifically for the use of Yat-Kha only. Kuvezin's next project was an album of cover versions picked from a diverse range of genres, including hard rock (Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks"), electronic (Kraftwerk's "Man Machine"), reggae (Bob Marley's "Exodus"), traditional folk ("Will You Go, Lassie, Go?), and classical (Alexei Tchyrgal-ool's 'The Song Of Mergen").
