In 1998, a teenaged Ganesh Krishnaswamy was standing in line for his college admissions and right behind him was Nolan Lewis. The two went on to become founder members of the heavy metal band, Kryptos.
They didn’t get the name (and more importantly, a proper gig) until late 1998, which is when they looked up the dictionary for inspiration and found “cryptic” and twisted its nomenclature. Ganesh, who went from being the vocalist-bassist in the first line-up to a bassist in the current iteration, recalls, “The only places we could play back then was college competitions. There was one at the Indian Institute of Science that we decided to play.”
It was as straightforward as finding out that Nolan had a guitar and an amplifier – one he got for free from a music store because his mother purchased a piano for his sister – and Kryptos began jamming. Nolan says with a laugh, “It is bizarre, when we started the band I had a guitar and an amp. Now 20 years later, I don’t have an amp to rehearse.” Ganesh says his intention was always to work on music that went beyond covering their favourite bands including Judas Priest, Black Sabbath and AC/DC. “We wanted to get play the guitar and try and come up with original compositions,” he says.
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Kryptos had six songs ready by the time they were a band. While none of the six songs ever came out, Kryptos spent the next two decades earning a name as one of the best metal bands to come out of the country. Like many bands at the time, Kryptos earned some money and made a name for themselves in India by participating in college band competitions.
Nolan recalls the competition was always “quite crazy” when they shared the stage with fellow Bangaloreans such as Thermal and a Quarter. “They were good musicians even back then,” Nolan recalls. The guitarist and vocalist adds, “You had that mindset that you had to be first in class and that was in the music scene as well. It was good in a way, because you improved rather than just lazing about.”
Ask him when Kryptos eventually won a band competition, and Nolan laughs saying it was almost two years after they were in the circuit. grinding it out. “We won our first competition in Mysore somewhere. We didn’t expect to win. The prize was ₹ 7,000 and that is about ₹1 lakh today. We thought, ‘Should we upgrade our equipment or drink?’ We got hammered.”
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By 2004, the band had released a few songs on compilations alongside fellow city bands like Threinody and Myndsnare. Their debut album Spiral Ascent , according to the band, was an underground success considering they had built a network over the Internet even back then, trading tapes and making friends on web forums.
But despite the good times, Ganesh says that “life caught up” with him, which led to the founding member leaving the band in 2005, concentrating on his professional and personal commitments. “I think me walking away was the greatest thing for the band, because the folks that Nolan put together after that took it to where it is today. If I had stuck around, we don’t know.”
Ganesh adds with a chuckle, “There is probably a parallel universe where Kryptos has either broken up or we are headlining and playing 700 shows in a year.”
While Ganesh returned in 2013, the resilience of the band over 20 years is something Nolan attributes to a generational trait. The frontman says, “Back then, we stick it out with a lot of things. We don’t give up that easily. If something bad happens, we’re not the kind of people who mope about it, we try to figure out ways to make it work. I see it in a lot of people who come from that time – life, work or anything. In our case, it is mainly because we love this music. Even if we didn’t have tours, labels and all that, we’d still be doing that. When we jam and get together, go for a drink, everything feels good. That’s all you can ask for. If it makes you feel good, keep doing it.”
A Bangalorean trait for the band, according to Ganesh, would be their laid-back, less stressed attitude towards everything that comes their way. He says, “The work is more important than everything else around it.”
And the work right now includes not just yet another one of their nearly-annual Europe tours, but also their upcoming fifth full-length album, due in the summer. Ganesh says it’s still in the same direction as their 2016 album Burn Up the Night , but adds that things have got heavier. “There are a couple of fast songs we don’t know how we’re going to pull off live. There are songs with a lot of hooks. Lyrically, I’ve gone to places I hadn’t gone to before, after hearing the song structures.”
Nolan name-checks metal idols Judas Priest’s 1980 influential album British Steel and adds about the vibe of Kryptos’ new album, “We want to play music now that you can listen to and drink to.”