Are Bloodywood moonlighting as wedding ceremony planners? The band are in the midst of a 40,000 square-foot banquet corridor on the outskirts of Chandigarh, a metropolis in Northern India. With its huge chandeliers, European-style statues and vivid murals, it’s a well-liked location for {couples} who need to alternate their vows towards a grand backdrop. Besides there’s no Indian wedding ceremony at the moment.
As an alternative, Bloodywood have booked the area to shoot a part of the video for Tadka, a single from their soon-to-arrive third album, Nu Delhi. Guitarist and producer Karan Katiyar will get the corridor’s supervisor to change on what looks as if not less than 1,000 gentle bulbs. It appears to gentle everybody’s temper up as properly, which was beforehand mirroring the chilly, smoggy climate outdoors.
Vocalist Jayant Bhadula, wearing his signature blue sherwani, jokes that you just would possibly discover a physique buried below the glitzy marble stairs. Rapper Raoul Kerr factors at a chandelier and notes {that a} bulb is “winking” at him. The touring members of the band – bassist Roshan Roy, percussionist Sarthak Pahwa and drummer Vishesh Singh – are not any much less excited for the day’s endeavours.
“What’s about to occur right here, it’s by no means occurred and it received’t occur once more,” says filmmaker Kushagra Nautiyal, who’s directing the video.
The video, like Nu Delhi itself, marks a step up for Bloodywood. In just some years, they’ve gone from an web covers band to worldwide steel sensations. A part of that success is all the way down to their portrayal of their unabashed Indianness, however their emphatic, emotional songs have damaged language and cultural obstacles, placing each the band and Indian steel basically on the map.
Tadka options the distinctive interaction of growls, rapping, riffs and Indian folks rhythms that’s Bloodywood’s signature sound, whereas the lyrics are a hearty love letter to Indian meals in all its range. Summarising Nu Delhi, Raoul says: “The album has our signature, it has our evolution, and it has our future.”
Karan, Jayant and Raoul are the core of Bloodywood. All three are pleasant and welcoming, however the place Raoul is garrulous and chatty and Jayant is at all times prepared with a joke, it’s Karan who appears to maintain the entire operation ticking over. He’s the one who’s at all times on time and ensuring everybody else is on time too.
“Chaio aa jao,” he says when he needs individuals to get a transfer on, which interprets as “Come on!”
Karan was working as a company lawyer when he began Bloodywood as a studio undertaking in 2015, dropping steel covers of fashionable Punjabi and American Prime 40 songs onto YouTube. By the point he was joined a yr later by Jayant – whom Karan knew from Delhi band The Cosmic Reality, and who was working as a expertise booker on the time – Bloodywood had begun to draw consideration for his or her pairing of Indian music’s rhythmic parts with abrasive nu steel riffs and breakdowns. That sound was cemented by 2018’s viral hit, Ari Ari, a canopy of a bhangra music that includes native rapper Raoul, accompanied by a memorable video that includes Karan enjoying guitar whereas using a camel via the streets.
“When Karan and I first spoke about our collaboration, it didn’t really feel like, ‘Oh this will probably be one thing new and totally different,’” says Raoul, who turned a full-time member in 2019. “It was extra like, hip hop and steel work so properly collectively.”
Within the wake of Ari Ari and their first unique music, Jee Veerey, issues bought much more severe for Bloodywood. It was the top of a parody-loving, try-everything undertaking and the beginning of an Indian steel band that the nation, or certainly the world, had not seen earlier than.
“When Karan and Jayant had been constructing the channel, they had been one of many few artists in India who had worldwide consideration,” says Raoul. “So we thought, ‘If we do one thing loopy, everybody’s going to listen to it and it will probably amplify on all sides of the world on the identical time.’ And that’s precisely what occurred.”
YouTube undeniably performed an enormous half in Bloodywood’s preliminary rise. It allowed them to showcase their music and movies to the world. However on the coronary heart of it was a DIY ethos that Karan says continues to be in place at the moment.
“Some issues by no means change from once we began out,” he says, as Raoul and Jayant start organising the props they purchased from a neighborhood retailer. “You may see what’s occurring proper now. What has modified is the dimensions of issues. We’re now doing issues that we thought solely in all probability large Punjabi or Bollywood artists may do.”
That is evident within the movies for the primary two singles from Nu Delhi. The promo for the title monitor noticed Bloodywood rocking out with followers and mates in a metro prepare compartment. The band had been prevented from filming by native police till they may produce permits for filming. Permits sourced, issues had been quickly again on – ahem – monitor.
“They halted visitors on the roads for us in order that we may shoot,” remembers Raoul. “No person within the visitors was too pissed about it both!”
That was the costliest video Bloodywood had made, not less than till the hanging animated promo for follow-up single Bekhauf, a collaboration with Babymetal that discovered the latter singing in each Japanese and Hindi. They took a big gamble with it, and it paid off: the music has been seen greater than 1.8 million occasions on YouTube.
“Our goal isn’t to maintain going dearer,” says Jayant, “however the reality is that we will do stuff like that, and we consider that is one of the best ways to go.”
India has had steel bands for many years. One of many first had been Millennium, fashioned within the South Indian metropolis of Bengaluru within the late 80s. They had been adopted within the Nineteen Nineties by the likes of Dying Embrace and Kryptos (each additionally from Bengaluru), whereas the brand new millennium noticed the emergence of Mumbai’s Demonic Resurrection, fronted by the entrepreneurial Sahil ‘Demonstealer’ Makhija, and the next decade noticed the ranks swollen by prog metallers Skyharbor, loss of life metallers Gutslit, thrashers Amorphia and a number of other others.
All of these bands undoubtedly paved the way in which for Bloodywood, however any preliminary suspicion that greeted their very own rise (“Gatekeeper shit,” as Raoul places it) has been supplanted by pleasure at their success. They depend Indian movie stars, comedians and Bollywood composers amongst their followers at residence, whereas everybody from Machine Head’s Robb Flynn to members of Avenged Sevenfold and Fever 333 have turned as much as see them play reside.
A measure of their success got here when their music Dana Dan soundtracked a pivotal struggle scene within the 2024 film Monkey Man, after being handpicked by the movie’s Britishborn star and director Dev Patel.
“He discovered it on YouTube,” enthuses Jayant, taking a break between scenes. “It was like YouTube magic, dude!”
For any Indian steel band, surviving with out a lot of a touring circuit at residence generally is a problem. As an alternative, Bloodywood have centered their consideration abroad, touring within the UK (the place they’ve performed each Obtain and Bloodstock), Europe, Japan and America.
Their 2023 US tour in assist of their second album – their first comprised of unique materials – Rakshak, noticed them supported by Vended, that includes Griffin Taylor and Simon Crahan, the sons of Corey Taylor and Shawn Crahan. It was the via the lads that Bloodywood bought to satisfy Slipknot.
“Corey Taylor got here in together with his aura and met me, shook my hand, mentioned thanks,” says Jayant, who admits he welled up on the encounter. “He mentioned, ‘I hope these boys aren’t troubling you.’ I simply gave him my gratitude. I used to be like, ‘Thanks for present.’”
It hasn’t been solely clean crusing, although. In October, forward of a pageant present in Kolkata, India – their first gig in additional than a yr – Jayant found that he had a polyp on his throat. Throughout rehearsals, it started to bleed. “We instantly needed to make the decision to do the surgical procedure,” he remembers.
The singer was rushed to hospital to have the polyp eliminated. The usual interval of relaxation and restoration after such an operation is 2 months. Jayant was again onstage in simply over a fortnight, although he seen his voice had modified.
“I’m in a position to sing how I used to again once I was 19!” he says proudly.
Bloodywood have been working via Tadka for a couple of hours, so it’s time for a break. They chomp down on meals they’ve ordered from a neighborhood freeway restaurant: curries, biryani, naan. “Hold consuming!” Karan orders exuberantly as they watch Raoul carry out his raps for the digicam.
It’s a becoming meal, given Tadka’s celebration of the variety of Indian delicacies, particularly home-cooked delicacies (‘Sizzle in the summertime ’cos we prefer it scorching / Rocking within the kitchen and we hitting just like the pot’).
The cameras seize Jayant sweeping his arms like he’s throwing imaginary salt and masala as the remainder of the band play behind him. However then India and its tradition has at all times been central to who Bloodywood are. In addition to a nod to their love of nu steel, Nu Delhi is clearly a reference to New Delhi, the nation’s capital and the town the band name residence.
“When it comes to storytelling, we’re focusing extra this time on the place we come from, our tradition and simply us basically. It’s extra about our story moderately than a generic story,” says Karan.
The title monitor seems at how the town’s tough-love perspective formed them, whereas Hutt is a fuck-you to bullies and Dhadak, Kismat and Bekhauf bristle with positivity (‘I take all of the concern, blood, the sweat, the tear / Grind it in my thoughts and discover one other gear’ sings Raoul on the latter). Raoul reveals the album touches on the bandmembers’ private aspect, but additionally broader themes equivalent to colonialism and combating towards oppression.
“What we’re saying is that as a result of what it was like on your ancestors to undergo oppression, use your energy to destroy the fashionable manifestations of these cycles now,” he says.
Equally vital to the band are the normal Indian sounds woven into their songs. Daggebaaz brings collectively bhangra influences, distinctive konnakol vocals, digital/ hip hop prospers and a deathcore-style beatdown.
The album actually sees the band increasing the vary of devices they incorporate – Tadka features a regal-sounding tutari horn, whereas elsewhere Nu Delhi options nagara drums, an esraj (a classical stringed instrument), and South Indian percussion within the type of the hand drum-like mridangam. Different devices deployed by the band embody the dhol, tumbi, tabla and santoor, and in addition, on Kismat, a sitar for the very first time.
“I feel it’s probably the most quantity of enjoyable I’ve throughout your complete course of,” says Karan. “Simply on the lookout for sounds and on the lookout for new devices.”
The band took virtually a yr off from enjoying reside to concentrate on writing and recording Nu Delhi. Karan was anxious about whether or not individuals would neglect about them of their absence, however the laborious work Bloodywood have put in over the previous couple of years has ensured the viewers they constructed has been there for them now they’ve returned.
“The one factor you could do is take heed to your viewers,” says Karan. “To make music that you just like and your viewers likes.”
It’s the top of a protracted day, and Bloodywood’s time on this grand corridor is nearly accomplished. Tools is packed away and meals cleared up. However the work is barely simply beginning. In a couple of weeks they’ll return to Europe for his or her Return Of The Singh tour forward of the discharge of Nu Delhi, together with a run of UK dates culminating in a present at London’s 2,300-capacity O2 Discussion board, their largest headlining present but outdoors of India. The place is all this main? Bloodywood’s ambition is easy: to be India’s first actually globally profitable band, and alter perceptions – and misconceptions – of the nation within the course of.
“We need to get so far as attainable and get as many people who find themselves like-minded collectively, have a good time musically, but additionally create a neighborhood that may really have an effect on the world,” says Raoul.
Bloodywood might have achieved greater than another Indian steel band, however it’s taken quite a lot of work to get thus far, not least for Karan.
“I’ve sacrificed my private life, for positive, as a result of that is all I do,” he says. “I don’t take holidays. I’ve stopped gaming. I finished having fun with it as a result of work was at all times on my thoughts.”
Jayant has no regrets about leaving his job as a expertise booker to present Bloodywood his focus. “If it’s doing one thing I like, much less cash isn’t an issue. There isn’t steadiness in life, however it’s the value of what we’re doing, and I don’t thoughts paying that value.”
Nu Delhi is out now by way of Fearless. Order your unique Bloodywood bundle that includes the band’s Metallic Hammer cowl characteristic and an unique T-shirt design on-line now.