How Bloodywood became South Asia’s world-beating metal sensation
If you want to cement your status as metal’s newest breakout star, opening the main stage at Download festival has historically been the proving ground. Trivium’s set at the Donington weekender in 2005 kicked off a whirlwind year of magazine covers and mega support slots, where Alien Weaponry’s 2019 rager attracted hungover metalheads by the tens of thousands. When India’s Bloodywood took that same stage at 11am two years ago, it felt like another anointment, announced in 30 minutes of primal metal riffs and distinct Indian folk.
“It was almost like looking at a sea of people and then a hill of people,” guitarist/producer Karan Katiyar remembers, his pride radiating out of a massive grin. “The turnout was massive! We never go in with any expectations because we’ve always found that, if we keep our expectations low, we’re always beating them. But that was one of those moments you dreamt of as a kid.”
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Talking to Guitar.com from his studio in New Delhi, Katiyar keeps that smile going for almost the entirety of our 70-minute video call. And who can blame him? Bloodywood have forged a career out of making aspiring metal musicians’ dreams come true, the Download slot being just one entry on a list of colossal achievements.
A diehard metalhead ever since a chance encounter with the genre at a battle-of-the-bands competition, Katiyar quit his job as a corporate lawyer to make Bloodywood happen in 2015. “I told my parents I was working on a start-up, which I wasn’t, but technically it was,” he laughs. The gamble first paid off when the trio, rounded out by howler Jayant Bhadula and rapper Raoul Kerr, became Facebook celebrities with a metallic take on traditional Indian song Ari Ari in 2018. They capitalised with a European tour the following year, one stop on which was Germany’s gargantuan Wacken Open Air.
The international goodwill was affirmed when the band’s 2022 debut album, Rakshak, cracked the top 10 on the UK Rock & Metal and US Digital charts. It then grew even further when their track Dana Dan soundtracked a scene in action blockbuster Monkey Man. In the process, Bloodywood became India’s biggest-ever metal export – and they did so without having a record label at their back.
“No one really cares about the Indian metal scene,” Katiyar says to explain their unprecedented global reach. “So, my idea was to be exposed to the internet and put ourselves out to the entire world. You can be a regional artist if you’re maybe doing hip-hop in the local language or pop in the local language. But, with metal, it just doesn’t work, at least not in India.”
Image: Shrey Gupta
Core Memories
As much as Bloodywood eschewed their surrounding scene, initially posting cover songs on Facebook and YouTube to cultivate a following, the soundscape of India is essential to their music. Their songs are pulse-pounding nu metal at their core, Katiyar seemingly out to cave in eardrums with his eight-string guitar riffs, yet the band also mix Hindi lyrics with English and use the dhol, a drum-like folk instrument. “It’s made out of goat skin and I don’t even know which kind of wood,” says Katiyar, “but it’s very tribal.”
Bloodywood’s new album is called Nu Delhi: a pun that summarises their convergence of nu metal and Indian influence. Its lyrics are as full of nods to their nation’s culture as its music is. For example, Tadka takes its name from a South Asian cooking technique, and the song sees Kerr passionately rap about the food he ate growing up: “Vicious and delicious, you don’t wanna miss this. And if you take a bite then you licking all the dishes.”
But it’s not blind propaganda, either. The title track drags the listener through the overcrowded streets of India’s capital, a metropolis of 34 million people. “Everyone’s tested here,” Bhadula admits in Hindi. “Home to both saints and sinners – not a city, but a game of chess.” For Katiyar, the goal is to offer the wider world a view of India that’s authentically Indian.
“People have a very different impression of India [than what it actually is], and a lot of that is to do with TikTok,” he says in a moment of seriousness. “We don’t have TikTok in India. And, on TikTok, there’s a skewed version of India that constantly gets portrayed: dirty food, dirty roads, dirty people. That’s what gets traction. But you actually have to hunt for those things. If you ever come to India and you’re looking for a bad place to eat, you have to go to the worst part of the worst city. That’s not what this country is about.”
His big grin comes back, followed by an even bigger laugh. “If it were, all of us would be dead.”
Fast Friends
For many metalheads, the standout song on Nu Delhi will doubtlessly be fourth track Bekhauf. The synth-fuelled scorcher sees Bloodywood team with Japan’s viral idols Babymetal in what the band have called “a piece of Asian metal history”.
“I’ve been a fan of Babymetal for a very long time,” Katiyar says, “just because of the way they use synths and the way they use vocals: it’s a way that is not very traditional to metal. When we played Japan in 2022, our promoter told us that Babymetal were going to come watch us.”
He adds, “I met Kobametal [Key Kobashi], their producer, right before we went onstage. In my naivete, I told him, ‘It would be cool to work on something together.’” Another laugh. “And he had the most smug smile you will ever see on a Japanese man.”
As visibly happy as Katiyar has been throughout our conversation, his mood peaks when we ask about the guitars he’s owned. “Oh, my lord! I’m going to introduce you to the fake guitar industry of India,” he replies with all the excitement of a kid before show-and-tell.
His first guitar was an electro-acoustic from a brand called ‘Givson’ – yes, really – with an amp by the company Stranger. “One of their amps had an overdrive setting which was, of course, a knob, but the moment you turned the knob from zero to anything at all, even 0.01, it would fully distort your signal,” he chuckles.
Image: Shrey Gupta
Axe Man
During Bloodywood’s first tour, Katiyar used a Line 6 Variax Shuriken, which was developed by Steve MacKay of prog metal beloveds Twelve Foot Ninja and could switch between tunings at the twiddle of a knob. Although it let him make it through the band’s then-setlist of covers and originals without switching instruments, he quickly abandoned it. “It just didn’t sound good to me for some reason – although I probably wasn’t trained enough to make a decent tune out of something that’s not a traditional guitar,” he concedes.
He switched to a custom model from Indian manufacturer Bigfoot Guitars in 2022 – “It was so easy to play because the shape just sat really well with my weird body” – before becoming an Ibanez-endorsed artist two years later. He now uses an RGDMS8 for everything, from recording to every single live show.
“It’s got Fishman Fluence pickups and it was my first time using active pickups,” he remembers. “The moment I played on the Fish Fluence, I realised that playing guitar isn’t that hard. Playing the instrument became so much easier than what I was used to and getting the sound that I’d always craved became so much easier. It sounded good straight out the gate.”
Katiyar will take two RGDMS8s with him on the road when the Nu Delhi live cycle kicks off – which is shockingly double the number of guitars he’s ever toured with previously. When we express our disbelief that a full-time, gig-headlining musician played around the world without as much as a backup instrument for years on end, he just shrugs it off. “We like to live dangerously!”
He continues: “I’ve got a lot of shit from bands we’ve toured with. I’ve seen them have guitar issues because of moisture and all of this, and I don’t understand any of it. I’ve never had a problem playing the same guitar every show.”
That last sentence quickly gets walked back. “I had to eat my words one show,” Katiyar admits. “The screw that holds my guitar strap in place broke. I needed a second guitar – which, in my wisdom, I didn’t have – so I sat down and played a couple of songs, which was really lame. Third song in, my string broke. I rushed to the green room to restring it and the band continued without me. By the time I was done, it was the last song and I played the last song from the green room.”
Mercifully, Bloodywood are now better equipped than ever to deal with the big time, and not a moment too soon. Nu Delhi will be released by Fearless Records (home of Starset, Chase Atlantic and Ice Nine Kills) and promoted with headline dates through Europe and Japan. Looking to the future, Katiyar reveals he’s already planning album number three, making it safe to assume his band’s snowballing momentum will not stall anytime soon.
“Our manager told me that it’s going to be stressful for three to five albums, then we’ll learn a flow to it,” he says, even if his nonstop positivity today shows no sign of stress. “So the next album is my primary objective, because it’s what I believe will determine the longevity of our career.”
Nu Delhi is out on 21st March via Fearless. Bloodywood tour the UK from 22nd March.
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