Chennai’s metal scene evolves with steady head banging and roars

Most of the 100 people gathered around The Spotted Deer pub in The Palomar hotel in ECR early in April were in black T-shirts, while others wore distinctive white shirts and lungis.

Shreyaa Lakshmi Narayanan, one among the few managing the crowd, had never heard a metal song before this sold-out gig. But she has been bobbing her head to heavy music ever since.

The genre is making noise again in Chennai. And there is no better proof than Metal Munnetra Kazhagam, a cover gig by musicians across the city in tribute to globally legendary bands Slipknot and Rage Against the Machine.

“It wasn’t just a concert…it felt like a turning point, a hope for even greater collaboration and creativity in the community,” said Aditya Rao, frontman of Mangas and the Mango Men, a metal band born in 2022. 

Formed with a sly spin on Tamil Nadu’s distinctive political party suffix, the gig featured members of Chennai’s loudest homegrown bands, like Mangas, Moral Putrefaction, Frankendriver and Godia, teaming up with each other to roar and get roared at.

“We wanted to change attitudes towards metal, and mix bands to give people new to Chennai a chance,” smiled Manu Krishnan, one of the organisers. 

This year has been more than a revival for metal in Chennai. It has also been a reinvention: in embracing Tamil culture as a brand, who gets to play on stage, accessibility, and in the very heart of what it means to love the heaviest sounds of Chennai. 

Armaan, Manu and Srikanth Natarajan founded Metal Chennai in 2018 to change the idea of “metal being an expensive hobby,” in Manu’s words. Saturday night’s screaming marked the first big Metal Chennai gig since September last year, which was hosted in Gears n Garage in Nungambakkam. When the pub indefinitely shut shop, it signalled a shrunken number of venues willing to host metal.

Nevertheless, metalheads in Chennai have for generations been fighting tooth and nail to keep the volatile pulse of the scene alive: finding scream-friendly venues and trying to build a community that is safe and enticing for everyone, while still tough and edgy enough for the brand.

Venues that both sonically work for metal and are willing to host it in the city are rare, unlike ones like Bangalore. “Metal is not like other genres. We can’t just amplify the sound. It needs an advanced setup,” says Shivamoorthy of Moral Putrefaction.

The Palomar hotel began operations just last month, and talks are ongoing for future events.

The craze for metal in fact dates back to at least the Sixties, according to Eddie Prithviraj, who joined in the early Nineties. He’s been organising live music gigs across genres like jazz and pop in Chennai for 30 years, but back then, he had just founded a metal band called Bone Saw, and another called Blood Covenant in 2004. Issues with venues date back to even his time, when he had to close one himself.

“Come the Nineties, a couple of rebels really wanted to explode themselves,” Eddie explains. “It’s never been in the mainstream. But it was there. Guys recorded extreme death metal on cassettes in 1996. It was something to be cherished. It isn’t anymore.”

Between 2015 and 2018, Chennai’s metal scene had once again “died,” as recalled by Armaan, Mickey and Isaiah Anderson, vocalist of progressive metalcore band Godia.

Mickey has convinced some of his bands to change their names and album art styles to make them fiercer because “branding matters in a commercial music space.” In Chennai and India at large, he argues, bands usually start in universities and they don’t think about branding then.

Chennai has seen a rise in more explicitly defined subjects in metal lyrics, with subjects spanning from genocide, the “rot” in society and rights for the queer community for Moral Putrefaction to mental health and depression for Godia. This, Shivamoorthy of Moral Putrefaction says, also goes against the tide of “aggression”, sometimes tinged with right-wing politics, in metal.  

As a culmination of all the trends in this genre in Chennai, the attendance at Metal Munnetra Kazhagam is what Beeto Jerrin from Moral Putrefaction describes as a “decent” crowd by the standards of 2023. Ironically, during the struggle to regain these numbers in Chennai, bands like his and Godia reached international acclaim with performances and signed records.

Despite metal now being forced to think in terms of business, the desire to increase listeners comes from a very personal place for many.

Armaan, points out that so far in India, there have been barriers of privilege in language, caste, gender and capital that restrict possibilities for both bands and audiences. One way this plays out in Chennai is women being sidelined in the metal scene This is something that Armaan, as an organiser, admits to still navigating. 

The gig also comes at the heels of a brand new college student-run platform MoshLit Events, the youngest group to organise metal and hard rock events, securing venues like 10 Downing Street and Steams n Whistles bar in GRT Grand. The technicality of sound is an issue here, according to Sivaramakrishnan, bassist for Frankendriver, but his bandmate Teeto Jerrin feels the energy at their gigs is sky high.

MoshLit kicked off just this year. They lay it all out on Instagram: commissioning graphic designers for posters, posting videos from the shows,  and almost daring people to come. Their aim is to bring metal to the “forefront,” with uniquely appealing initiatives like relatively accessible ticket prices and an after-party DJ. You could spot MoshLit at a Metal Chennai gig, and vice versa.

In today’s Tamil Nadu, metalheads keep grooving. Inside the toughness, Manu says, “we’re all teddy bears.” As Aditya puts it, “supporting each other will carry us forward.”