Pinkshift have had no shortage of outrage to simmer on over the last few years. Rather than blindly raging against the injustices being perpetrated against minorities, the queer community and the broader working classes, however, superb second album Earthkeeper finds the Baltimore crew seeking solace and resolution…
There’s nothing more rebellious than having hope in hard times. Soaking up the sunshine on a bright Wednesday afternoon in Baltimore’s northern Remington neighbourhood, the members of Pinkshift are fewer than 50 miles from the shit-show playing out in Washington, D.C. and could be forgiven for luxuriating in misery. Instead, they greet Kerrang! with warmth and optimism.
Unpacking the experiences behind and stories within second album Earthkeeper, there is no shortage of outrage from vocalist Ashrita Kumar, guitarist Paul Vallejo and drummer Myron Houngbedji. Rather than adding to the torrent of soul-shattering imagery and impotent rage, though, they’re seeking resolution to universal problems by tapping into lived experience and adversity. Times feel hard at the moment, and the future seems bleak, but as with its rich soil, the history of America has been stained by struggle before and its future has been all the brighter for working through. There’s no reason our future can’t be the same.
Over the course of an hour-long interview, a procession of the United States’ most beloved songs – from Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody to Rick James’ Super Freak – blares from the stereo in a nearby bar. And although none of the material on Earthkeeper is ever likely to become background music, the importance of communicating its authors hunger and longing, loneliness and needing to cut loose feels as poignant and infectious as it always has…
What exactly is the concept of Earthkeeper?
Ashrita: “The Earthkeeper is a representation of universal consciousness: the way that we’re all connected to each other, but also to the natural world and the life around us. The concept came out as more of the songs had this back-and-forth conversation with nature and the inner-self. She’s kind of a person, but she’s also kind of not. It’s about all of us, our own interconnectedness or responsibility to each other as living beings that occupy the same spaces: how we find the answers to our questions in us, around us, talking to friends.”
That sounds almost spiritual…
Ashrita: “That’s something that I hear more about Earthkeeper after explaining it than I ever thought about [while writing these songs]. But it is a spiritual record. It’s about how you figure out that everything is going to be okay in the end. For a lot of people, the word associated with that is ‘spirituality’. It’s needed with everything that life throws at you!”
Is it fair to say this is less about raging against the machines of power than transcending them?
Ashrita: “That’s a good way to put it. There are things that are in our control and there are things that are out of it. The best way that you can lead your life is to try to figure out how to deal with the things in your control to make your reality as great as it can be. That starts with exploring what you have, where you are, how you live already rather than going out to look for more.”
What’s shaped that mentality?
Ashrita: “There’s a lot. Losing people who are close to me for the first time in my life has been a big thing. That’s happened to all of us. Just grief. Another big thing has been everything that’s happened after [the Hamas attack on Israel on] October 7. And there’s the helplessness as you see Trump return to the presidency in America and fascism taking over globally. Seeing trans rights taken away. Seeing my friends and the people that I love not have access to the care that they need. Seeing all of our futures completely up in the air because we don’t know where we’ll be in another 30 years. On top of all that, we’ve been figuring out that there is no proscribed way to ‘grow up’. No-one is there to tell you how to take that and what to do with it. It’s really fucking hard being young right now and trying to figure out what your future looks like. It doesn’t look like our parents’. And it’s only getting worse!”
Myron: “We’re all in our late 20s now. We all decided to commit to this band in our early 20s. We’re at a point where a lot of our peer group – of course everybody drifts off, but the people we keep up with on social media – has reached these milestones that we would maybe have reached if we’d chosen a different path: seeing friends from university graduating medical school at the same time I would have. There’s a discussion on the album of, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ Then even for the people who are ‘doing it right’ there is still the uncertainty of people not being able to know they can finish their PhD before their funding is just suddenly cut and their lab gets shut down.”
Ashrita: “There was a time in our life when we were all in the same place. Now we’re all in different places. There have been so many expectations that we’ve had to shed through the years. There’s this idea of what you’re gonna do in your 20s: get a job and a house, probably buy a car, maybe have kids. That doesn’t happen so much anymore. But it also feels like it happens to everybody except you!”
Is there an additional weight on that with being as politically-minded as you are?
Ashrita: “I don’t feel like it plays into that line of questioning. There are already so many different issues to feel anxious about. But speaking up about what is right and wrong doesn’t weigh in that way. Low-key, look at us. A lot of times, we just get labelled as a ‘political band’ for speaking on the reality of life as us and people like us. The way that ‘political punk’ is generally categorised is in a white-dominated, male-dominated space where the norm is not to speak about these issues that don’t affect them. It’s just something that people need to hear. If you’re not hearing these things already you are not surrounding yourself with people who are different enough, often enough. If I see something wrong, I’m going to speak on it. But it was honestly a surprise when people started calling us ‘political’ because from our perspective it just feels a lot more ‘emotional’. Casting aside those things as just ‘political’ allows the otherness to thrive. An issue to be addressed rather than people expressing our deepest emotions connecting to other people and ourselves.”
Paul: “We just document our own experiences of growing up: the experience of being a brown, queer person in music. That doesn’t make anyone better than anyone else.”
Myron: “That’s less about ‘speaking on issues’ than protecting the people around us.”
At the same time, there hasn’t been such hostility against righteous minds in living memory…
Ashrita: “That’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot this past year – especially when we’ve been doing things like touring with The Linda Lindas, where we had to cross the border in and back out of Canada. We already get shit at the border with agents being rude to us. But speaking onstage openly about this stuff can lead to you being targeted. It’s not about ‘backlash from the industry’ or ‘backlash from fans’ or people not liking us. It’s real danger for ourselves and our families, our friends and our communities. It doesn’t feel great when it feels like you’re one of the only bands speaking about stuff in the States. And I don’t like the idea of punk having to rely on black and brown people putting their bodies on the line for justice. I think that proves that we shouldn’t be the only people speaking on important matters and artists with generations of citizenship who can’t be touched speaking up on the same is a great way to use their privilege.”
Lead single Evil Eye felt like the showcase for a darker, heavier version of the band. Is that a reflection of your headspace?
Ashrita: “Oh yeah, we’re getting heavy!”
Paul: “There’s been a resurgence in metallic influence. We’re very into Loathe, Knocked Loose, Slipknot. Ashrita was the one who pushed me to buy my first seven-string. It wasn’t that we were pushing for any one style, it was just that we just let it happen. Our 2023 EP Suraksha was recorded on a baritone guitar and that led to lower tunings. Plus, we’re all low-key metalheads, and we don’t really ‘stay in our lanes’. Like, Ashrita came in with guitar parts for Blood and Spirit Seeker!”
The track opens with a line spoken in Hindi – ‘बुरी नज़र मुझे छू नहीं सकती (The Evil Eye can’t touch me)’. It’s about the reality of dystopian mass surveillance in 2025, but to what extent does it also draw from your personal feelings and experience?
Ashrita: “Evil Eye just felt like this ‘death dance’ – like we were running away from something, like a chase. The second verse is where it gets deep, with this feeling of running away from your own desperation. That can apply to the feeling when someone passes, or the one when you realise that climate change [can’t be stopped]. I got asthma from the wildfires and have a ton of climate anxiety. It was when we started brainstorming visuals that it became about how, nowadays, you’re always being watched. You’ll talk about something and it’ll start showing up on your Instagram. When we’re onstage, we’re being recorded. Our whereabouts are being shared when we’re out on tour. Activists are being picked up by ICE right now. If you want to fight the good fight nowadays, performative activism is not enough, but you need to be smart about it!”
All 12 tracks are bangers, but Blood feels like a real pivotal moment, while the late pair of Suspended and Reflection are particularly powerful moments of introspection…
Ashrita: “These 12 songs came from 18 that we actually wanted on the album, and we had to fight for every one. Blood is a stand-out track because it’s the one that thematically inspired the album. I wrote that riff early on and every time I’d come back to jam it, it seemed like I’d come up with another song for the album. Suspended and Reflection definitely stand out, too, because they’re two of the only really happy songs. They’re songs where you find peace. It’s cool to write songs about finding peace. Music is my outlet and I usually write songs about feeling angry.”
Myron: “I’d shout out Don’t Fight, too. And it almost didn’t make it onto the album. We recorded it basically on the last day because we annoyed Brett into letting us!”
Ashrita: “Don’t Fight is definitely our secret favourite on the album. And it’s our manager’s not-so-secret favourite. It’s a bunch of shit that we’ve never done before. Paul is singing. I’m only screaming. The structure is something that we’ve never really done before. It came about from being out in Germany playing shows with La Dispute and Birds In Row. We were obsessed with Birds In Row after that show.”
This is the first album you’ve written since being able to tour. What impact has that had?
Myron: “I’ve been to a lot of hardcore shows over the last two years, too. I’ve become really attuned to the power of a riff to make me move when I turned up at the show intending to just stand at the side watching along. I leave the show wanting to be able to do that: to make people move against their own wills. There have been times when I’ve gone straight from those shows to the practice space because I need to hit the drums.”
Ashrita: “You see how things are possible. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s not as difficult as I thought it was!’ Previously we’d write songs on Logic separate from each other, and you can write some great songs using those methods, but this time it was important that they all came together as jams!”
If the band you started out as before the pandemic could see the one you’ve become today, what would they think?
Myron: “It’s funny. When I was in high school, on my birthday every year I would draw myself at that age talking to myself when I was 12. Every year, 12-year-old me would be like, ‘Woah, you did that?!’ And each year there would be progressively more text talking about what I’d done and how things were changing. I imagine what it’d be like now doing that with my 27-year-old self, talking to my 21-year-old self. Firstly, it’d be as long as a book. Secondly, my 21-year-old self would just think that I’m lying. ‘Oh, I’m gonna play the same festival as Green Day – in Germany?! Yeah right…’”
Paul: “As a child of immigrants, I had my expectations managed to where I was ready for music to be just a hobby. I’m an only child with responsibilities to look after my parents in later life. Meeting Ashrita and Myron broke my expectations, not just in what music could be as a career, but what I could achieve creatively as part of a group. I think that the person I was six years ago would be so proud to see me here now with two full albums and three EPs of music with the same people that I’ve grown with. Being part of a team is never easy, no matter what you’re doing. There’s a lot of work and love that you have to put in. I think that past me would be very proud to have seen how I’ve been able to put so much love into this thing known as Pinkshift.”
Ashrita: “Past me could’ve never seen this coming. Honestly, I’d already just surpassed my expectations by being happy, because I never thought I would. I have so far exceeded my expectations for how fulfilled I am and how fulfilling this has been, without family connections or our parents even understanding what we’re doing, without anyone knowing us or having the backing of some institution. It’s kinda wild. We’re ‘first-gen rock stars’! How crazy is that?!”
And if the next generation stumble across this album, what would you like them to take from it?
Ashrita: “There are a lot of different emotions. They’re all important. They’re all faces of the same being. There’s a lot of anger and a lot of grief, but also a lot of happiness, resilience and peace. This album proved to me that peace is always accessible if you make the choices to bring you that peace. I want people to be inspired to make the changes in their own lives that they’ve been thinking about, to look into things that they’ve been ignoring. I’d love it if it was an album to make a corporate sell-out to dream again, if corporate sell-outs listen to Pinkshift… Hey, I know you’re out there!”
Earthkeeper is due out on August 29 via Hopeless
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