Music
Listen to Pinkshift’s playlist curated for this week’s Cover Story
Dive into The Sound Of Pinkshift – 25 songs hand-picked by the band themselves, featuring everything from punk classics to post-hardcore angst to some raging pit-starters...
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The Cover Story
Pinkshift: “Love is rage, because when you love something, you fight for it”
When faced with mortality, we question our existence. What’s the point of our time here, and how do we make it meaningful? Pinkshift believe we have the answers inside us. On new album Earthkeeper, the Baltimore trio discover how anger and love have more in common than we think, and how both emotions can incite us to take ownership over our futures…
- Words:
- Rachel Roberts
- Photography:
- KT Kanazawich
“Our frontal lobes have developed!” chuckles Pinkshift vocalist and guitarist Ashrita Kumar, as they look back on all that has changed between the band’s 2022 shiny debut, Love Me Forever, and their brand-new beast, Earthkeeper.
Ashrita, fellow guitarist Paul Vallejo, and drummer Myron Houngbedji were the plucky new kids on the block when Love Me Forever dropped; it was a firecracker of a record that felt wound up and tense, sparkling with pop-punk energy as it tore into the anxieties of trying to enter adulthood amid the pandemic. It was intentionally fast and crushing, mirroring the vast onslaught of information and algorithms that we were relying on more than ever before – from trying to keep up with the news to doomscrolling ourselves dizzy.
On Earthkeeper, Pinkshift have taken their emotions out of the pressure cooker, and have given them space to just be. Following extensive touring and experiencing collective bereavement since their last release, the trio’s music now presents itself with a more jagged edge, but also with a whole lot of feeling and sensitivity.
“We’ve really committed to the band,” Ashrita says. “We’ve been touring non-stop, and really figuring out who Pinkshift is every night that we’re onstage. Making that choice every night to be like, ‘How do I want to share my artistry tonight?’ and seeing what sticks.”
“One of the biggest things for us since releasing Love Me Forever was experiencing grief on a very close level,” adds Paul. “It was a huge pivoting point for the stuff that we write about, and the emotional state that we entered in the writing process for Earthkeeper.”
Ashrita and Myron nod along. They’re a calm presence to be around; the three of them sit shoulder-to-shoulder in a beautiful picture of buddies who have lived through some shit and still show up cheerful, engaged and kind. We chat prior to a record store show taking place later this evening in New York: a live format they’re relatively new to, and one they appreciate thanks to an easier set-up and relaxed vibe.
“Touring together for as long as we did… we did not take breaks,” Ashrita explains. “We saw each other at our worst moments and at our best moments. You’re onstage and there’s this huge rush of dopamine, everything is amazing, and then you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I have not been home in two weeks and I miss my life, I miss my cats. Everything’s falling apart!’ Having those conversations and only having each other to rely on, it’s like backpacking with your friends in Europe for two years.”
Offstage, Pinkshift’s fortified bond helped create a space that was supportive and open-minded for the conception of Earthkeeper. Their lyrics and instrumental ideas often interconnected organically, forming finalised tracks that were flooded with shared pain.
“We definitely had a hand in each other’s parts a lot more this time around,” says Myron. “I developed a stronger confidence in getting outside of the percussion world, and bringing up ideas on guitar that we’d then all develop together… I never really knew if any of the ideas I had on guitar were good. Everything’s subjective, but it was really validating learning to trust the others to support whatever vision I had, and then letting them add their own influences until we got something we were all happy with.”
“Everyone approaches songwriting so differently, some more serious and more playful, but for this specific release it was imperative that we all listened to each other about how we felt and what headspace brought these lyrics,” continues Paul.
“[For track] Don’t Fight, your lyrics were about something completely different, and they inspired me [to write] about something that was happening in my life that was completely different,” says Ashrita to Paul.
“But if you read it on paper, it makes a story because we’re connecting on the same feeling,” Paul adds.
Don’t Fight is a favourite among the band, with Ashrita taking on fry vocals and Paul experimenting with the more melodic side. Like a cold shower on sunburn, it hurts so good. It’s most potently influenced by post-hardcore bands La Dispute and Birds In Row, who Pinkshift gigged with in Germany last year.
“The emotions that came through at that show just captivated me,” Paul grins of Birds In Row’s set. “I was packing up, doing stuff at the merch table, and I just stopped. I could not stop watching. [I checked] out their record Gris Klein afterwards, and it’s the same energy. You can feel the anguish in the melodies, in the yells, screams and lyrics.”
Any kind of music can make you feel something, but Earthkeeper goes further. Pinkshift have created songs that feel almost tangible by making them so human. Bar opener Love It Here, most of these songs are not about oppressors or systems, they’re about us. How are we coping? What can we do? Who are we if we don’t stand up for each other and the place we call home?
To dig deep into the true meaning of Earthkeeper, we begin with the name. The title itself is loaded, and it raises questions – like who or what is the Earthkeeper? It may also make you think of similar terms like ‘peacekeeper’, perhaps, with the ‘keeper’ element signifying a sense of ownership, power, control and great responsibility. So how do these themes show up on the album?
“Earthkeeper is really this sense of feeling responsibility for the earth, feeling responsibility for how we treat each other [and] taking ownership over your future,” shares Ashrita. “It’s deciding [that] I’m not going to wait for things to happen anymore, I’m going to execute. I’m going to act on who I want to be, what I want to represent, the ways in which I want to contribute to the world.
“These are really important things that I think capitalism can get in the way of, especially when you’re in your 20s, because everybody’s telling you to do something; they’re telling you to make money and they’re telling you to be stable. We live in a world where that doesn’t really cut it. We’re alive, and that’s so much bigger. You only get to live once, what do you do with that life?”
“You only get to live once, what do you do with that life?”
As Ashrita explains, asking ourselves these existential queries can be painful. It’s within our nature to want more, and therefore we always feel like we’re never quite where we’re supposed to be. We play catch-up to our contemporaries, we compare ourselves to others, and we’re inherently greedy as a species. But if we truly delve a little deeper than superficial milestones, Pinkshift argue that questioning our purpose can actually be rewarding. Being human may be far less complex.
“You are the Earthkeeper, I am the Earthkeeper, and we are in constant conversation with each other,” Ashrita continues. “All the questions that you have, you have the answers within you. ‘Why am I here?’ ‘What am I doing with my time here?’ Those questions are really unavoidable when you experience grief specifically. Nothing is here forever. So how do I navigate that in a meaningful way?
“[For] the first half of the album, I’m down here and I'm looking up. I’m like, ‘Earthkeeper, please give me something. Protect me. Tell me what to do.’ And then after [the song] Patience, we kind of come up into a space where it’s like, ‘Oh, you actually have to answer these questions for yourself. How are you going to respond to all of your grief? What does it mean to you?’ We have all the answers inside of us, and it’s a literal conversation that plays out.”
By the end of the record, Pinkshift are daring to be ambitious and optimistic, despite all the blockades they call out in the first half. Leaning into care and compassion, it’s a summation of the saying, ‘The world is cruel, and therefore I won’t be.’
The three friends all agree that they are all soft-natured individuals. The most beautiful hindrance one could be blessed with, it has both challenged them and made them introspective and thoughtful songwriters, even if they are their own worst critics.
“I’m very critical of everything I do,” Myron confesses. “If there’s something that’s being said about something that I created or helped to create, I already made that comment to myself, you know? I already have my own critiques, but also, I really enjoy social interaction, it just has to be in a way that I opt in and out of.”
Myron is a professional at tapping out of gatherings when his social battery begins to run short. A respectable talent that all introverts are familiar with, and know is never intended to be personal or rude. Sometimes, you really have just gotta take a nap or simply just exist by yourself somewhere quiet.
“I grew up extremely sensitive; people’s words hurt me deep when I was a kid. I think between the ages 18 and 24 when I really started to build my own image of myself, [things changed]. It gets to a point where you’re not really thinking as much about how people perceive you, because the way you present yourself is the way that you want,” he expands.
By understanding this treasured part of themselves, Pinkshift tuned into their individual heritages. In turn, these inspirations also helped to craft the spiritual nature of Earthkeeper. Ashrita grew up Hindu, a faith they describe as “very different” and wise.
“It’s not a monotheistic religion,” they explain. “Every deity, entity, or protector is rooted in nature. There’s somebody who represents the sun and somebody who represents the earth. There’s somebody who represents the oceans, the mountains. I feel like that is a very deep, old, ancient kind of wisdom, [which] is what we really tapped into for this record.”
As for Paul, he found himself connecting with a sense of indigeneity within Ashrita’s lyrics on some of their old demos.
“I grew up Catholic, but I don’t practise it really,” he shares. “I feel like my sense of self and what grounds me is my ties to my family’s cultural background [and] heritage from the Andes mountains in Peru.
“The first time I went back to Peru after eight years was after the first album. Seeing, not just my family, but traveling hours to where my grandparents were born in a remote village in the Andes, it was like, ‘This is where I’ve come from. This is how my grandparents view nature, this is how they view the earth – they’re farmers.’”
“Colonialism has impacted the entire world,” Ashrita points out. “It was so violent. We haven’t healed from that as a collective people. We’re kind of coming to a reckoning with the violence of colonialism and capitalism, and how we subject ourselves to it every fucking day. I think as a sensitive person, you feel that pain.”
Earthkeeper arrives at a time where even existing on this planet can be polarising. When we look at what people are doing to others across the globe, it’s devastating. Pinkshift are gravely concerned with injustice happening anywhere, but right now, they’re especially vocal in their support of the Palestinian people.
“It’s becoming blatantly obvious that what is wrong on a political level is actually what is wrong on a societal level,” states Ashrita. “It’s wrong on a personal level. It’s anti-humanity.”
They’re one of many bands to speak out in this way. But, they’ve said it before and they’ll say it again, Pinkshift are not a political band. Earthkeeper is not a political record, either, though it may be labelled as such. As Myron puts it, “Not wanting people to die is an argument that people are having… whether or not people deserve to die.”
The bleak picture becomes even bleaker when simplified in this way, and there’s a lot we can learn from Earthkeeper in this sense.
“This album is a very honest presentation of humanity,” Ashrita says. “I feel like Love Me Forever was also like that, where [we’re] just like, this is how it is. If you don’t want to accept it, then you can call it whatever it is. When I look at Earthkeeper as a record, it is pushing past the idea that suffering can be politicised or that existence can be politicised… You have a soul, you have a purpose, you have love. These things are radical.”
“This album is a very honest presentation of humanity”
Continuing their drive for unity, Pinkshift will be heading out on tour across the U.S. and Canada during October and November, before hopping across to the UK and Europe in 2026 in support of grandson. They don’t want to say too much just yet on what to expect, though they do say these shows will be more “dynamic”. They want their gigs to continue to be a “place for you to feel free”.
As for what else lies ahead, they’re open-minded. The heavier direction that took place on this album may not necessarily be replicated again, but for now, it’s the perfect soundtrack to intertwine with our messiest yet our most important human emotions. Rage and love are not rivals, they’re teammates.
“I have this inherent love for every living being. I have this inherent love for everybody who is alive on this earth, because I understand your experience as a human. I know how you feel when you see somebody that you haven’t seen in a really long time, I know how you feel when things don’t go the way that you want to; I know what that’s like, because I’m human just like you,” Ashrita says plainly and calmly.
“When I see injustice done to people, my rage is that love. The rage that I feel is the height of that love for your humanity, for your sense of peace, and for our relationship to each other as living beings who are sharing this earth. That love is rage, because when you love something, you fight for it.”
Ashrita smiles, “I take that love, and that is what I hold on to.”
Earthkeeper is out now via Hopeless Records.
Listen to Pinkshift's curated playlist now on Apple Music.
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