“We’re horrible at naming things,” laugh Sachin Iyer (drums) and Dennis Dey (bass and vocals) of Bengaluru-based indie and garage rock band Iyer’s Filter Coffee (the quartet is rounded out by Rushil Mishra on guitar and lead vocals and Pushkar Ravindra on guitar and vocals).
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“The band’s name came from a kind of running gag,” says Sachin, “where we came up with names with Iyer in it such as Iyer Learns to Groove, Iyer Learns to Rock and then there was Iyer’s Filter Coffee. We ran it past a focus group of three friends and a dog. I think the dog wagged its tail for the last one and that’s how we went with the last option.”
Earlier this year, the band emerged co-winners at NLSIU’s prestigious Strawberry Fields music festival. Their EP, Cold Turkey, was released last year as part of Apple Music’s New Artist Spotlight. While they had planned to launch their debut album, Is This How You Do It , by March-end or early April, that changed owing to the lockdown. The album was instead released across streaming platforms on March 23 with the video for the first single, ‘Noize’, up on YouTube.
The eight-track album was recorded last year and produced by Vivek Thomas. Sachin says, “We had a couple of songs from earlier when recording the EP. Our process is that one of us has an idea. In most cases, it is Rushil who pens the lyrics. There is a broad structure he comes up with and we work on it together, tweak each other’s parts and build our individual parts as well. Once we had eight songs in place, we decided to do it at one stretch so that the songs would be consistent across the album.”
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As for their musical influences, which also played a part in the title of their album, he says, “The Strokes and the Arctic Monkeys would be our primary influences. The Strokes’ debut album was titled Is This It , which is one of the greatest début albums comparable to say, Ten by Pearl Jam. There is this nonchalance that both The Strokes and the Arctic Monkeys have when it comes to either naming things or even the kind of things that they tackle, at least in their early material. That is primarily what influenced us when we started writing music and recording it. And particularly with the album title, we have tried to embody that spirit which, in itself does make a statement.”
Adding that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are also a huge influence (as can be heard on the track ‘Untitled001’), Sachin says, “This is particularly for me as a drummer but also (on) the way we write music.”
Says Dennis, “While most of the songs were penned by Rushil, ‘Deytime’ is a song that I wrote. Initially, we were calling it ‘Deytime’ just as a joke. At the time of releasing the album, since we couldn’t think of a better name, we went ahead with that. And since there was an instrumental outro to that, it was separated as another song called ‘Nitetime’.”
Dennis also edited the music video for ‘Noize’, which comprises footage of the band performing in a distinctly retro palette. “We had planned to have proper videos shot for the album. But owing to the lockdown, we were unable to get out of our homes. I had a habit of setting up my phone on a tripod at our gigs and recording so I edited a few of those videos.”
Sachin adds, “We wanted to go with a retro theme and Dennis, being the creative person that he is, was able to visualise that.”