It’s been a long wait for the fans of Indian Ocean, who, ever since Tandanu in 2014, have been looking forward to the band’s next album. They will soon get down to releasing a couple of singles, which will then find their way into the yet-untitled record. And while their earlier one had a whole lot of collaborations, Amit Kilam stated that that’s not the primary thought with the upcoming one. “However, we do have Pandit Vikku Vinayakram on one song and saxophonist George Brooks on another,” the drummer and vocalist told us.
The band played some of their new as well as popular tracks at the Day of Grace charity concert that took place yesterday for the volunteers of Mumbai-based NGO Angel Xpress Foundation and their families. For the band, this was their small way of showing appreciation for all the work being done by the organisation. “People who make the world tick are the good people, so we need to celebrate them,” he said. The band loves performing in Mumbai every time they get a chance. “People, especially the younger crowd, loves listening to new music and the audience always appreciates ours,” he added.
Even after former member Asheem Chakravarty’s passing and Susmit Sen’s exit, the band, consisting of founding member Rahul Ram and newer entrants Himanshu Joshi, Tuheen Chakravorty and Nikhil Rao, Indian Ocean has managed to stay relevant since many years. One of the key reasons for that, according to Amit, is that they’ve always created music they’ve wanted to make.
“We don’t even have a genre of music. In fact, this is one of the questions that’s asked to us most often — what our is music like. We don’t get slotted in any category easily since we didn’t make any music which was in with those times or fashion. We just made what we had heard or had lived in our lives, and I think that’s why we still have our own audience. There will always be people who willing to listen to a human story or a human element in a song because that’s beyond fashion or trends,” he signed off.
