Hyderabad Rock Artist Alluri Goes Multilingual on Upcoming Album

A minute into our interview, Hyderabad-raised singer-songwriter and indie artist Shriram Alluri says that he was, “in an extreme way to put it,” lying to himself on The Man of Truth, his debut album from 2016. He says, “I was writing songs in English – [and] even though that comes naturally to me – [it] wasn’t an accurate representation of my whole self, I suppose.”

That in turn made him write a fully Telugu album, his native language, leading the way on his 2019 follow-up O Katha – Tales of This Telugu Man. Along the way, Alluri was based out of cities like London and touring Europe, but he moved back to India, setting up in Mumbai about two years ago. “I was hearing a lot of Hindi on the streets and I don’t speak Hindi that well, only the Hyderabadi sort of Hindi which people laugh at when I speak,” he says with a laugh.

After O Katha, Alluri was drawn to writing in more languages as a way to communicate to more people. It’s what has made his upcoming yet-to-be-titled third album a multilingual offering. There are songs in Hindi, Telugu, a bilingual track in Malayalam and Telugu, and one in Punjabi. “There’s possibly one in Tamil and one in Bengali too. Those two are still to be finished. And of course, some songs in English too,” the artist adds. With recording taking place in the U.K. with indie-rock band Razorlight’s drummer Andy Burrows helming production, Alluri says the album will be mixed in February.

Moving from Mumbai back to Hyderabad with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Alluri says the significant challenge with his upcoming multilingual album was finding lyricists. Among the Hindi writers is a university professor and poet. Fully aware that his spoken Hindi was terrible, Alluri says he realized that “when you sing things, there is more leeway with pronunciation.”

The themes on the album cover relationships and things that the artist feels strongly about, even if it’s a sport or specifically, poker. “I wrote a song about poker called ‘The River,’ but no one would know it’s about poker,” Alluri says. As someone who’s been a songwriter for about 15 years now, he says he’s far more comfortable with it now, adding fiction to lived experiences and vivid dreams.

To write this record, Alluri had to set aside what was going to be one star-studded album being recorded in the U.K. with punk-rocker Glen Matlock and bassist-guitarist Earl Slick (known for working with David Bowie and John Lennon). “It’s weighing on my mind to figure out having a good label behind you. Putting the word out on a record is always challenging. I’m still persevering,” Alluri says. With two albums in the bag, the artist feels there could be more potential to work with a label, but the search is ongoing.

While there’s a multilingual approach to his next work, an album like O Katha gaining traction abroad (“I’ve been placed in the world music category to a certain extent. And because I play a bit of a rock-and-roll style, it goes into a regular festival, but on a slightly different level,” he says) has given Alluri his niche. Even though it was difficult to convince Telugu-speaking audiences, director Tharun Bhascker has commissioned a song for his upcoming Telugu film soundtrack. “He was alternative enough to sort of get what I was doing and he’s actually going to use one of my songs from O Katha,” the artist adds. Taking this route through film music, Alluri hopes he gets called to perform for more Telugu audiences all over the world.