Kryptos To Finish Fourth Album This Year

It’s been 15 years since Bengaluru old school metal band Kryptos got ”¨together. What started out in 1998 over a late night drunken chat between frontman Nolan Lewis and former bassist Ganesh Krishnaswamy (now vocalist with stoner/doom band Bevar Sea) is now one of the biggest old school metal bands in the country, with three albums and two international tours, including the latest one in Germany starting this month.

Kryptos joined the likes of thrash metallers Threinody and death metal band Myndsnare in the Bengaluru metal scene, but never took a break despite lineup instability. In 2006, Krishnaswamy quit the band to join Bevar Sea and guitarist Rohit Chaturvedi of rock band Mutiny joined Kryptos. Next, Chaturvedi roped in his Mutiny bassist Jayawant Tewari for his new band. Says Tewari, “When the band formed, it had a lot of dreams. That’s one of the reasons it’s been alive for so long.”

That all the band members have day jobs and have managed to keep the band going is a feat. Tewari works as a designer for an e-commerce store, Lewis works at an insurance company, drummer Ryan Colaco teaches music and Chaturvedi works at an advertising firm. They’ve all managed to take time off from their routine for their second Euro tour this month and return with the sole intention of finishing their fourth full-length album, the follow-up to 2012’s Coils of Apollyon. “Watching kickass bands is the kind of exposure that will do us all a world of good,” says Tewari, adding that the band has sketchy riff ideas, but it will take another two months before they head into the studio. Kryptos may call upon sound engineer and producer Anupam Roy, who worked on Coils of Apollyon, to produce the new album as well. “He got us to a point where the production actually flatters the music, rather than the other way around,” says Tewari. The fourth album will have a mix of thrash/doom influences and Lewis’s continued themes of fantasy, science fiction and the occult in terms of songwriting. Although the band wants to go on another tour before the end of the year, they plan to finish recording by December, tracking guitars and bass at Chaturvedi’s and Tewari’s home studios.

As for the Coils Around Europe tour this month, the main highlight is their performance on the last day of the three-day metal festival Wacken Open Air in Germany, one of the biggest metal events in the world. “This is a big gamble for the organizers because they’re putting an Indian band in a prime time midnight slot on the last day,” says Tewari.