Exclusive Premiere: Pangea Returns With ‘Sleep Now Tomorrow Will Come Sooner’

After about two years of silence and flux, Mumbai instrumental rock/metal act Pangea are back with a new song. Founder and guitarist-producer Akshay Rajpurohit now helms Pangea as a solo project, performing synth, guitar and even mixing and mastering on “Sleep Now Tomorrow Will Come Sooner.”

The first official release since 2014’s “This is NG, taking” and their 2016 live recording of “But none of them are as strong as you are,” Rajpurohit says it’s back to his roots in a way, considering he had written Pangea’s debut album Snails are when I was young in 2011. He adds, “We were playing those songs for the band and then started writing music together once we were on the same page.”

Since their tour with American/Indian prog band Skyharbor in late 2016, creative differences seemed to have brought Rajpurohit ”“ also guitarist in hardcore band Scribe ”“ back at the helm. He says, “I love writing new music. I guess the speed is something I wanted to keep up and hota hai life mein (it happens in life), people have different things to do and they can’t allocate time.”

The change in members also meant a change in the process, which had begun to involve drummer Jai Row Kavi, bassist Krishna Jhaveri, guitarist-producer Shadaab Kadri and guitarist Kuber Sharma. Rajpurohit speaks of the previous unreleased Pangea live material as something that was born out of jams and bringing in each members’ individuality, but says he’s now focusing on new songs.

The song takes its title from an utterance to Rajpurohit, when it would alleviate his anxieties surrounding situations and even before getting on stage for gigs. He says, “Someone special said that to me and lot of her quotes have become Pangea song titles from the first album. When she said this, it really connected with me, with an air of vagueness.”

The first of a few more singles that will be released over time, Rajpurohit adds, “I thought I might as well take it back to the start and see maybe if after this release, the same circle might loop again, where someone calls me and maybe there’ll be a new Pangea. I don’t know, I’m just going with the flow and writing music.”