Musical rhapsody

A young band talks about its journey and the plans ahead

The band members

From a classic rock band to creating a separate identity with heavy metal music, the journey from ‘Echo’ to ‘Against Evil’ has been a memorable musical rhapsody for this group of young musicians. As they launched their first heavy metal composition recently, they share the story of their journey together.

The story behind the band

We formed Echo, a classic rock cover band in 2010 to play at a city hotel on a contractual basis. The band was started by Srichu, Sasank and Jay Goswami and was joined by Siri, Sasank and Sravan. Apart from hotel contracts, we started playing a lot of gigs around the city and won a lot of competitions.

Why branching out to a new band ‘Against Evil’

In Echo, we only played covers of famous rock artists and never got a chance to compose and play our own songs. Since Echo has become famous as a cover band not only in Visakhapatnam but also in places like Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kerala, we did not want to rename or disband. We then formed ‘Against Evil’ to focus only on composing and playing our own style of heavy metal music.

You guys play music because

Music is one thing that inspired us all right through our childhood. Watching rock bands perform live triggered that passion in us to play live and draw crowds. Rock Music has a lot of emotion to it, we feel that ignited the fire in all of us to compose Music and spread the word of rock.

A memorable moment

When our first single, ‘War Hero’, got international acclaim. A-UK based magazine called "All about the Rock" gave us a 9/10 in their review.

The toughest part about being a young band

The kind of music that we play is not popular in India and also not easily encouraged. we have many problems when we played live, when bollywood, tollywood , house and trance music used to draw crowds and we spend almost years in mastering the instrument and sometimes disheartening to play for a crowd of 50. Secondly, like in abroad, Music is not considered a full time career, But we consider ourselves lucky to have parents who are supportive. Financially, bands earn nothing, its a challenge to pool in money and sponsor ourselves in composing music and promoting it.

The story behind the name

The name came only after we wrote a couple of songs. Our lyrics were based on themes like war, corruption, etc. We thought that "Against Evil" would be an apt name for the band.

Musicians that inspire you

We are inspired by the US and UK based heavy metal bands from the 80's such as Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Megadeth, Metallica, etc.

Compositions Vs covers

Playing covers is fun,there will be a lot of crowd interaction to it but composing original music really brings out the talent in a band. In fact all covers are once own compositions by some band. It is an awesome feeling when someone sings along to one of our own compositions while we are playing live.

Evolving music scene in the country

The music scene in the country is evolving at a rapid pace. Especially, rock and metal music. There are a lot of talented bands in the country who have got international acclaim and popularity. A lot of international artists have started touring India.