Death By Fungi Announce New EP ‘Die In Bombay’

When guitarist, vocalist and drummer Vrishank Menon was in school, he was “pretty much a bully asshole” who hung out with a similar crowd. “I was a menace overall,” the founder of hardcore band Death By Fungi says.

On their forthcoming EP Die In Bombay, Menon traces two distinct stories – “Guilt and Admission” comes from being that bully while the title track takes a bleak look at Mumbai – alongside remixed and remastered versions of “Ingrates” and “Attrition,” off their 2015 debut self-titled EP. Menon says, “The new songs are about horrible, violent things we saw in Bombay.” On the pummeling “Guilt and Admission,” the band coils their way through a story about how Menon “diffused” a situation involving bullying in his school, even though it meant getting his friends in trouble. He says, “All the boys wanted to see this guy get beaten up. I smashed the mirror and the noise got the attention of the teachers – so everyone ran out. It was such a shitty situation.”

Death By Fungi ‘Die In Bombay’ EP artwork by Anoop Bhat

The follow-up to their 2017 split record with Bengaluru sludge band Shepherd, Die In Bombay is the first to feature vocalist Tabish Khidir (from doom band Dirge), who brings his simmering defiance, even as Menon also takes on vocals. On the title track, they’ve even incorporated Hindi lyrics about privilege and “dehumanized Bombay.” Hindi vocals is something Menon says we might see more from Death By Fungi. The guitarist adds, “It’s not just for the sake of doing something new, but there’s more things you can put in to make it unique. We’re writing it in Hindi because when we fight with each other, we fight in Hindi. It’s kind of fight music, so it makes sense.”

The new EP clocks in at just about eight minutes, but as Menon and drummer Aryaman Chatterji tell us, it’s not easy writing hardcore. Chatterji, a death/thrash metal fanboy who came into the band not entirely familiar with punk and hardcore, says they’ve been trying to push the boundaries with Die In Bombay, which is out next month. The drummer says, “Vrishank is abroad more than half the time. He keeps sending me riff scratches and I keep working on them and we just bounce it off each other and see if it sounds good. We really pushed that process to the brink. We scrapped more than 80 percent of the work we’d done and took the rest that was left. It was very scrutiny-oriented.”

Artwork for Death By Fungi’s Monsoon shows. Art: Anoop Bhat

Menon, who currently lives in Evanston, a town near Chicago in the U.S., is back in India for a break, which is usually when Death By Fungi shows take place. In addition to performing at gig series Blackblood on July 20th, they’ve also lined up shows in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and New Delhi in August. The founder has a few new ideas for merch for these run of shows. “I’m trying to make umbrellas. I saw the B.J.P. were giving people umbrellas so I thought, ‘Bombay Hardcore umbrellas. Why not?’ It’s a great idea.”

Death By Fungi Monsoon 2019 shows

July 20th – Above the Habitat, Mumbai (Blackblood ft Demigod, Letters, Sutej Singh, Emergency Trigger)

August 9th – TBA, Hyderabad

August 11th – TBA, Bengaluru

August 29th – TBA, New Delhi