The Rise and Rise of Metal In India

In Tripunithura, on the outskirts of Kochi, I meet a young band called Heretic. Tripunithura used to be the capital of Cochin province until 1957. Heretic’s practice space lies inside the palace of the former king of the place. They play me four tracks at 11 in the morning. They are tight, zippy, and very loud. They say they would have played louder except that there is a sick lady upstairs. Akhil Unnikrishnan, the bubbly vocalist, tells me something which I also heard being said at the Sunday Jam, “Metallica is over for this generation. You will not find a single band our age playing Metallica covers.’

And there lies the big generational shift in Indian metal. Broadband is at the heart of it. The younger bands were born at a time when India had already opened up to the world. They tuned into the sounds of the metal resurgence which came out of Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway, as well as Latin America and Japan. The old guard – bands formed around 2000 – does not see eye to eye with their younger counterparts. Nolan Lewis of Bengaluru, whose band Kryptos has just signed a record deal with a British label called Old School Metal Records says, “You distill the Pantera sound into a metal-core format and it appeals to everyone. There’s hardly anything to think about.” The difference between generations is serious for him, “You learn to cut a steak, you savour every bite. The trendy stuff these kids listen to, well, it’s like fast food.”

Access has changed everything. Yasmin Kazi, drummer with Bengaluru thrashers, MyndSnare, remembers going to National Market and buying cassettes with photocopied covers. The recordings, she recalls, were quite pathetic. Clydes and Pyramid in Delhi’s Palika Bazaar were the other big pirates. In the early Nineties, you had to work hard to find your music.

Compared to the Nineties, kids now also have access to original equipment. There are cheaper alternatives coming in from China. This is a far cry from 1989 when Manjit Joseph, guitarist with Delhi’s Ashtoreth, borrowed 25,000 rupees from his mother and set off on a long journey to buy some equipment. His hometown of Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh had no shops which sold cymbals and guitars. So he went to Hyderabad and then to Delhi where he bought a cheap drum kit, cymbals, a locally-made electric guitar, a bass guitar and two amps. He taught himself how to play. His band, Samaria, used to practice in a shed. In 1993 they got a contract to play at 10-D in Hyderabad but NT Rama Rao’s prohibition policy put an end to those dreams.