The Fringe Pop To Release Debut Album In October

The Fringe Pop. From left to right: Aaron Marcus, Caleb Prabhakar, Shreyas Kendurkar , Ankeet Bhat

Mumbai alt rockers, The Fringe Pop have had a single-digit gigging record so far, but quite a few fortuitous events have changed the course of their career graph. Last year, heavy rains led to the upcoming band opening for Finnish death metal giants Children Of Bodom at the Kingfisher The Great Indian Octoberfest in Bengaluru. Later that year, the band, who had no plans of releasing an album this year, landed a record deal with Chill Om records after winning IIT-Bombay’s Mood Indigo rock band competition, Livewire 2012. The alt rockers are currently finishing work on their debut album, tentatively titled If You Haven’t Noticed It Yet, which they plan to release this October.

Formed in college by engineering students of BITS Pilani, The Fringe Pop is now a quartet of working professionals, who manage to find time to gig occasionally, with their latest show in Chennai being their fifth one until date. With their drummer [Caleb Prabhakar] based in Hyderabad, the Mumbai rockers find it challenging to gig regularly. “Caleb tries to visit Mumbai often, but we can’t play midweek gigs with our job schedule,” says guitarist and vocalist Shreyas Kendurkar, who works as a marketing executive in Mumbai. While Prabhakar works as an analyst in Hyderabad, Marcus and Bhat in Mumbai work as a software engineer and business developer respectively. The four, however, took a week off from their day jobs in April to record their album at Gurgaon’s Chill Om and Mumbai’s That Studio. “The recording is done, only the mixing and mastering is pending,” adds Kendurkar. 

The seven songs in the album look at the quartet’s journey from being engineering students to working professionals. “The only recordings we have so far are two demos we recorded in 2009. So we had a lot of material for this album. Some of the songs were written over six years ago when we first formed the band,” says Kendurkar, referring to their gig staples such as “Fake Reality” and “Little Mistake.” The album also features new material such as the uptempo “The One Who Dances,” which was written a week before the band stepped into the studio.

Thematically, the album explores the concerns of 20-somethings ”“ life on campus, heartbreaks and such. Another song on the album, “Dil Rubba,” is a ballad (not in Hindi despite the name) that talks about long distance relationships. “The new material is very different. The mood is the same but the sound is continuously evolving. The song construction is changing throughout the album. We were very immature earlier, but now the lyrics are more meaningful. In college, we just wanted to play, and didn’t give much thought to lyrics,” adds Kendurkar, referring to their single “Rockstar.” The upcoming album also features Indigo Children’s Sanchal Malhar on an as-yet-untitled track.  

In Chennai, where they make their gigging debut this week as part of Purple Fest, the band will perform “a flurry of compositions,” as Kendurka puts it. “Sanchal is not in Chennai, but we are hoping to collaborate with musicians there,” he says, “We will play songs from our upcoming album as well as newer material we are working on, besides a few covers of songs by The Arctic Monkeys, The Beatles and The Strokes.”  

The Fringe Pop performs as part of The Purple Fest on August 16th, 2013 at Ramada, Egmore, Chennai. Entry free. For details, click here.