Exposed Vocals Interviews Punarukti
Punarukti is a quartet metal band formed on 2012 when four metalheads fused their musical ideas for a heavy metal band. Hailing from a little town called Alipurduar in the state of West Bengal, India with Debashis as vocal, Mano with guitars, Snehashis on Bass guitar and Amit as drummer, together founded the band on the March of 2012. They performed on local stages with much audience appreciation covering mostly classic metal songs in the beginning with elements of their own. They are now cited as one of the influential metal band of the famed North Eastern Rock Scene of India.
Punarukti’s dark and doomed music with beat variation and breakdowns incorporated with groovy tempos made them stand apart in the crowd of Indian Metalheads. Their lyrics are mostly reflections of protest against social discrimination, politics, drug addiction, warfare, terrorism. Recently they have released a single “Ground Zero”( dedicated to the victims of 9/11 https://www.reverbnation.com/punarukti7/song/25487470-ground-zero ) with much critical acclaim and positive response from the national crowd. This has led them inside the top 10 list of reverbnation artists(all genres) and also inside the metal chart.
Exposed Vocals: So tell us your story. Where did you grow up? What made you decide to become an artist?
Punarukti: Well Punarukti is a four-piece Heavy Metal Band from Alipurduar, this is the small city where we grew up, except for our guitarist Mano who is from Kolkata, but raised and brought up in North Bengal. We all shared our common teste for Heavy Metal scribbling years and stuff in note books and that led us for form Punarukti on the March of 2012.When Snehasish our bassist, and Mano were discussing about forming a band to integrate their idea and verses into reality.
Mano: We started out together, jamming in my house until then I brought Debashis, an old friend of mine on vocals, and Amit joined in as a drummer couple of weeks later.
Our decision to become as artist is further fueled by the unrighteousness,
discrimination, corruption of the social and political order and we find music as the best option to raise our voice against these propagandas.
Exposed Vocals: How did you come up with that name? What was your inspiration behind it?
Punarukti: Well Punarukti is an ancient Sanskrit word and it means reiteration. Actually the inspiration behind it was all rooted in the Old School Heavy Metal scene. We want to bring back the glory of classic heavy metal in modern terms. That’s what the name suggests.
Debashis: We have been influenced by great bands like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Judas Priest, Pantera, Lamb of God to name a few. We took the elements of the classic Heavy Metal, fine-tuned it with a modern twist and added our secret ingredients to characterize the sound.
Exposed Vocals: What do you think about online music sharing? Do you ever give your music away for free? Why?
Punarukti: Well, in terms of now, we find online platforms as the best affordable place to share our music where we have the opportunity to get heard by audience all around the globe.
But music shouldn’t be for free. Every artist burns his soul to create a piece of art through his music. So, the best way to support a musician is to buy his music, be it a recorded CD or Online. Though our Latest OC “Ground Zero” is streaming for free @ Reverbnation and SoundCloud but we did this to dedicate the track to the lost souls of 9/11. You all can share the track. It will always remain free.
Exposed Vocals: Since everyone was a start-up once, can you give any smaller or local bands or artists looking to get gigs and airplay some tips?
Punarukti: To become a successful artist are should never lose faith in himself. Always trust yourself and your music and that’s the secret recipe to become a successful artist.
There are gigs and concerts taking place all around out there. All you have to do is to keep an eye on the internet and stay updated.
Mano: Make as account on Music Promotion sites, share demos and always respond to opportunities. Someone’s surely out there to get you out of the garage.
Exposed Vocals: Where do you usually gather songwriting inspiration? What is your usual songwriting process?
Punarukti: As we have stated earlier our music is the voice of protest against evil propagandas of the social system. Our lyrics are mostly against the decay of the humanity fueled by discrimination persecution and class division. We find any news of Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Violence against women, corruption and that we convert to lyrics for our Music.
Debashis: Songwriting is mostly done by me and Mano. We jam together a lot and whatever ideas and words come to our mind we just let it flow within us. We lose ourselves to the music and we integrate those bits and pieces to our songs.
We’ve seen our loved one suffer the wrath of Terrorism, Social discrimination, Human trafficking, Violence against the women and Corruption. They made us stand firm to our ground against all odds and fight for the righteousness.
Exposed Vocals: Do you have a band website? What online platforms do you use to share your music?
Punarukti: Yeah, we do have a band website( www.punarukti.com ). Besides this we have a Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Punarukti link and a Twitter ( https://twitter.com/PUNARUKTI1 ) link to connect to our fans.
We share our music through online platform like Reverbnation link, and SoundCloud link. Audience can check out our songs recorded this far on these websites https://www.reverbnation.com/punarukti7 https://soundcloud.com/punarukti7
Exposed Vocals: If you were given half a million dollars and a year off, what would you do? How would you spend it?
Punarukti: That would be great if we were given half a million dollars, we would spend the money in buying pro quality gears for recording and produce our album independently.
Snehasish: Yes, we would like to build a studio of our own, upgrade our instruments and gears, buy pro quality recording equipment and keep producing our singles/albums for our fans.
Exposed Vocals: How do you find ways to promote your music? What works best for you?
Punarukti: We find online streaming sites, podcasts, music blogs and mags like yours as an efficient medium to promote our music. Also we believe in live performances. We participate in Gigs and Concert to showcase our music and that’s really helping us connect to our audience.
Mano: Performing live on stage with an audience of 1000 is the best way to present a piece of music, because on online platform we couldn’t say how much people are really appreciating our songs, but live on stage they get the opportunity to judge a band face-to-face. That’s how we got a big fan base, the bigger it gets and more promotion we receive.
Exposed Vocals: So, whats next? Any new upcoming projects that you want to talk about?
Punarukti: Yeah, we are working on our debut album ‘CHAOS’ which we are planning to release at the end of the year.
Got a lot of gigs to attend to and waiting for the performance in Hard Rock Café, New Delhi on 1st June 2016. After that we’ve got Hornbill Metal Festival, Nagaland. We are planning to play on Bangalore Open Air a division of Wacken Open Air(India). We also have the responsibility to organize a Metal gig, ‘DIABOLICA’ in our little city.
Exposed Vocals: If you werent making music, what would you be doing?
Punarukti: We are not quite sure, we are so intimated with music that we can’t think anything without it.
Debashis: Music is what we breath in. We won’t make a single day without it. Our life would be a living hell if we weren’t involved in music.
Amit: Yeah in this case if you ask we all have our daytime jobs. Then maybe we would be busy fulfilling our responsibilities.
Exposed Vocals: How do you juggle the rest of your responsibilities while trying to stay ahead in your music life?
Punarukti: It is music which drives us through the worldly clamors and responsibilities. As Amit told you above that we all have our respective daytime jobs. We return from our places within evening and we assign the rest of the remaining time t music. Our families also help us fix our schedule and that’s how we are doing it.
For us, music comes first. Everything else can wait for it. But yah, there are problems associated with every careers and music is not an exclusion. We’ve sacrificed many a thing for music but whenever we look back and think about it, we never regret doing so.
Exposed Vocals: What should fans look forward to in 2016?
Punarukti: Well we’ve got news for them too. Our debut album ‘CHAOS’ is on the way and stay tuned on facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/Punarukti ), & twitter ( https://twitter.com/PUNARUKTI1 ) for our latest updates.