New Music: Digital Suicide’s new track #NoStateNoRest

Pop punk band Digital Suicide from Assam have maintained a low profile for atleast two years now. When we last watched them perform in Mumbai in 2013, the band were fiddling around with laptops and toyed with the idea of renaming themselves Mr.India. But as their vocalist and guitarist Daniel Langthasa tells us, Mr.India was only meant to be an experiment with electronica. Adds Langthasa, “We were planning on recording an album or an EP for quite some time, but somehow things never worked out and we have always ended up not being happy with it. Now, recording songs on the go is really inspiring us to write more songs.”

Last month, Digital Suicide, proved to be more active than they’ve ever been since they got together in 2010, releasing three new singles in a span of three weeks. Members of the band including Langthasa and bassist Dpak Borah recently shifted from Guwahati to Haflong, while their drummer Simanta Choudury continues to shuttle between the two towns, and their new music is a take on insurgency and violence involving military task force in the region.

The three new tracks including “#Akhuni”, “#OperationAllOut” and “#NoStateNoRest” were released as lyric videos on YouTube. Says Langthasa about Digital Suicide’s new material, “It is a mixture of things which I got inspired by when I came back to my hometown after 15 years.” “#NoStateNoRest” was recorded in a park, the vocalist tells us. “We wanted to try something new. A 48-hour bandh was going on in Haflong and the town was empty and very depressing. We have a lot of that shit in our town. It is a personal song because so many people in our town have lost their lives because of insurgency and terrorist activities. Even my dad was a victim to that,” said Langthasa. The track #OperationAllOut” is another protest song against terrorism in Assam. In early February, the band also released a series of videos titled #HaflongBandhJams on their FaceBook page to protest against the frequent bandhs in Haflong.

Digital Suicide plans to release more new material soon.