Having worked together on recent collabs Bekhauf and Kon! Kon!, Bloodywood’s Jayant Bhadula and Karan Katiyar share their appreciation for the “undeniable” BABYMETAL.
Bloodywood love BABYMETAL so much that they’ve worked with them on not one but two collabs lately. Following Bekhauf on Nu Delhi, fans of both bands have more recently enjoyed METAL FORTH’s Kon! Kon! – so we asked Jayant Bhadula and Karan Katiyar all about them…
How did you initially end up making music with BABYMETAL?
Jayant: “Bekhauf is a cool story. We said stuff into the universe. I remember when we were working on the album [Nu Delhi], Karan was producing, and we were discussing vocal lines at that point – like, we’d get on conference calls and make small demos with little bits here and there. And that’s when Karan was like, ‘BABYMETAL is going to sound very good on this track.’ That was it. Two days later, he gets a message from KOBAMETAL saying, ‘Hey, let’s work together on something.’ What you hear was literally what Karan created in terms of instrumentals and production, and the only changes were with the vocals. But it was all just power of manifestation.”
Karan: “When I spoke to KOBAMETAL at that time, I had sent him two tracks. One of them was the instrumental to Bekhauf. He liked both of them. He said, ‘How about we feature on Bekhauf and then you guys can feature on this track?’ We were running very short on time, because we had to deliver the album within a month. I said, ‘We can’t really work with both songs, but what we can do is, once we’re done with our album, then we’ll write a new song’ – which is Kon! Kon! from their album [METAL FORTH]. The way it worked was that KOBAMETAL gave us complete creative freedom on Bekhauf, and he expected the same from us on Kon! Kon!. Koba called all of the shots on Kon! Kon! and he let us take the lead on Bekhauf.”
How do you think the two songs compare?
Karan: “I think that a lot of people would say that Kon! Kon! sounds more like us than them. That’s what people said for Bekhauf – it sounded more like them than us. That comes from the mutual appreciation we have for each other’s styles. Because BABYMETAL were featuring on our song, we wanted it to sound like a BABYMETAL song, too. And that’s probably what KOBAMETAL wanted on Kon! Kon!. We have a bigger sonic influence on that song, but it’s the other way around for Bekhauf.”
Finally, what do you think makes BABYMETAL such an important band?
Jayant: “It’s almost like eating wasabi. Once you understand it, you love it, and you can’t have enough of it! I can understand why people will have their reservations, because J-pop and metal are polar opposite worlds. I think it gives you the feeling that basically anything is possible in that sense, and even if you feel like a misfit, you still belong. Because, again, that is what the initial hate was, ‘Oh, they’re singing pop,’ but look how well it blends – it’s undeniable. To all those misfits who can’t even properly fit in the metal sphere, they can get to express themselves. There’s a real sense of belonging in that.”
This interview originally appeared in the special-edition Kerrang! Presents BABYMETAL magazine.
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