Peekay Embraces Djent on New Song ‘Merciless’

Hyderabad artist Peekay aka Pranati Khanna has been steadily working her way into a modern, polished and heavy sound and there’s a culmination with the band’s new song “Merciless.”

Co-written and produced by Khanna’s go-to collaborator Jonathan Edward and mixed and mastered by Mumbai-based guitarist-producer Keshav Dhar, “Merciless” has all the makings of a prog rock and djent song. It might just remind some of the style that was put forward by the likes of Dhar’s band, prog rock act Skyharbor.

Khanna says she wrote the song initially using digital audio workstations like Logic and Garageband. “I loved the hook and sent whatever I had made to Eddy [Jonathan Edward]. He took it and as he always does, turned it into a beast,” she adds. Before this studio release with a music video that’s murky and unsettling in a way that rock and metal songs have been known to champion, Peekay performed “Merciless” live at Music Matters in Singapore as well as the regional leg of Wacken Metal Battle India. “It turned into a crowd favorite,” Khanna adds.

There are a few biblical references that the singer-composer says are par for the course with her songwriting, but also points to being influenced by Michaelangelo’s “powerful” depictions of heaven and hell in his paintings. “The way he portrays the devil or demons in all his work have particularly stuck with me and I feel like I have personally come face to face with many people who have a darkness in them that have brought me chills in this lifetime,” she says.

For the lyrics to “Merciless,” Khanna also points to another specific work of art – Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son.” Khanna, a visual artist as well as a musician, says, “The painting has a lot of different theories but the most common one is that it is a depiction of the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus, whom the Romans called Saturn, eating one of his children out of fear of a prophecy by Gaea that one of his children would overthrow him.”

The song arrives just as Khanna heads out to set up base in Los Angeles, marking a U.S. move on an artist visa. She says about the shift, “There is so much left for me to learn and bigger pools to learn to swim in. I love my country and it has given me a leg up but I am acutely aware that my genre of music holds very little space here. I do want to give it a shot in LA. I am lucky to have received the opportunity to go there and be an artist for a while.”

There are at least three singles that Peekay have roadtested live which will be released through 2024. For the most part, the year holds what Khanna calls a “welcome challenge” to make music in a different country for the first time. To her credit, she’s already got strong bonds with film producer Apoorva Charan [part of the acclaimed desi film Joyland] and rap-rock band Flipsyde’s vocalist-guitarist Steve Knight, with whom she released the song “Running” earlier this year. “There is also a group of fellow Indian musicians who have recently settled in the Bay Area so I might actually get by with a little help from my friends to begin with,” Khanna says.

Watch the video for “Merciless” below.