Are Bloodywood moonlighting as wedding planners? The band are in the middle of a 40,000 square-foot banquet hall on the outskirts of Chandigarh, a city in Northern India. With its massive chandeliers, European-style statues and vivid murals, it’s a popular location for couples who want to exchange their vows against a grand backdrop. Except there’s no Indian wedding today.
Instead, Bloodywood have booked the space to shoot part of the video for Tadka, a single from their soon-to-arrive third album, Nu Delhi. Guitarist and producer Karan Katiyar gets the hall’s manager to switch on what seems like at least 1,000 light bulbs. It seems to light everyone’s mood up as well, which was previously mirroring the cold, smoggy weather outside.
Vocalist Jayant Bhadula, dressed in his signature blue sherwani, jokes that you might find a body buried under the glitzy marble stairs. Rapper Raoul Kerr points at a chandelier and notes that a bulb is “winking” at him. The touring members of the band – bassist Roshan Roy, percussionist Sarthak Pahwa and drummer Vishesh Singh – are no less excited for the day’s endeavours.
“What’s about to happen here, it’s never happened and it won’t happen again,” says filmmaker Kushagra Nautiyal, who is directing the video.
The video, like Nu Delhi itself, marks a step up for Bloodywood. In just a few years, they’ve gone from an internet covers band to international metal sensations. Part of that success is down to their portrayal of their unabashed Indianness, but their emphatic, emotional songs have broken language and cultural barriers, putting both the band and Indian metal in general on the map.
Tadka features the unique interplay of growls, rapping, riffs and Indian folk rhythms that is Bloodywood’s signature sound, while the lyrics are a hearty love letter to Indian food in all its diversity. Summarising Nu Delhi, Raoul says: “The album has our signature, it has our evolution, and it has our future.”
Bloodywood – Tadka (Official Music Video) – YouTube 
Karan, Jayant and Raoul are the core of Bloodywood. All three are friendly and welcoming, but where Raoul is garrulous and chatty and Jayant is always ready with a joke, it’s Karan who seems to keep the whole operation ticking over. He’s the one who is always on time and making sure everyone else is on time too.
“Chaio aa jao,” he says when he wants people to get a move on, which translates as “Come on!”
Karan was working as a corporate lawyer when he started Bloodywood as a studio project in 2015, dropping metal covers of popular Punjabi and American Top 40 songs onto YouTube. By the time he was joined a year later by Jayant – whom Karan knew from Delhi band The Cosmic Truth, and who was working as a talent booker at the time – Bloodywood had begun to attract attention for their pairing of Indian music’s rhythmic elements with abrasive nu metal riffs and breakdowns. That sound was cemented by 2018’s viral hit, Ari Ari, a cover of a bhangra song featuring local rapper Raoul, accompanied by a memorable video featuring Karan playing guitar while riding a camel through the streets.
“When Karan and I first spoke about our collaboration, it didn’t feel like, ‘Oh this will be something new and different,’” says Raoul, who became a full-time member in 2019. “It was more like, hip hop and metal work so well together.”
In the wake of Ari Ari and their first original song, Jee Veerey, things got a lot more serious for Bloodywood. It was the end of a parody-loving, try-everything project and the start of an Indian metal band that the country, or indeed the world, had not seen before.
“When Karan and Jayant were building the channel, they were one of the few artists in India who had international attention,” says Raoul. “So we thought, ‘If we do something crazy, everyone’s going to hear it and it can amplify on all sides of the world at the same time.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
YouTube undeniably played a huge part in Bloodywood’s initial rise. It allowed them to showcase their music and videos to the world. But at the heart of it was a DIY ethos that Karan says is still in place today.
“Some things never change from when we started out,” he says, as Raoul and Jayant begin setting up the props they bought from a local store. “You can see what’s happening right now. What has changed is the scale of things. We’re now doing things that we thought only probably big Punjabi or Bollywood artists could do.”
This is evident in the videos for the first two singles from Nu Delhi. The promo for the title track saw Bloodywood rocking out with fans and friends in a metro train compartment. The band were prevented from filming by local police until they could produce permits for filming. Permits sourced, things were soon back on – ahem – track.
“They halted traffic on the roads for us so that we could shoot,” recalls Raoul. “Nobody in the traffic was too pissed about it either!”
That was the most expensive video Bloodywood had made, at least until the striking animated promo for follow-up single Bekhauf, a collaboration with Babymetal that found the latter singing in both Japanese and Hindi. They took a gamble with it, and it paid off: the song has been viewed more than 1.8 million times on YouTube.
“Our aim isn’t to keep going more expensive,” says Jayant, “but the fact is that we can do stuff like that, and we believe this is the best way to go.”
India has had metal bands for decades. One of the first were Millennium, formed in the South Indian city of Bengaluru in the late 80s. They were followed in the 1990s by the likes of Dying Embrace and Kryptos (both also from Bengaluru), while the new millennium saw the emergence of Mumbai’s Demonic Resurrection, fronted by the entrepreneurial Sahil ‘Demonstealer’ Makhija, and the following decade saw the ranks swollen by prog metallers Skyharbor, death metallers Gutslit, thrashers Amorphia and several others.
All of those bands undoubtedly paved the way for Bloodywood, but any initial suspicion that greeted their own rise (“Gatekeeper shit,” as Raoul puts it) has been supplanted by excitement at their success. They count Indian film stars, comedians and Bollywood composers among their fans at home, while everyone from Machine Head’s Robb Flynn to members of Avenged Sevenfold and Fever 333 have turned up to see them play live.
A measure of their success came when their song Dana Dan soundtracked a pivotal fight scene in the 2024 movie Monkey Man, after being handpicked by the film’s Britishborn star and director Dev Patel.
“He found it on YouTube,” enthuses Jayant, taking a break between scenes. “It was like YouTube magic, dude!”
For any Indian metal band, surviving without much of a touring circuit at home can be a challenge. Instead, Bloodywood have focused their attention overseas, touring in the UK (where they’ve played both Download and Bloodstock), Europe, Japan and America.
Their 2023 US tour in support of their second album – their first comprised of original material – Rakshak, saw them supported by Vended, featuring Griffin Taylor and Simon Crahan, the sons of Corey Taylor and Shawn Crahan. It was the through the lads that Bloodywood got to meet Slipknot.
“Corey Taylor came in with his aura and met me, shook my hand, said thank you,” says Jayant, who admits he welled up at the encounter. “He said, ‘I hope these boys are not troubling you.’ I just gave him my gratitude. I was like, ‘Thank you for existing.’”
It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing, though. In October, ahead of a festival show in Kolkata, India – their first gig in more than a year – Jayant discovered that he had a polyp on his throat. During rehearsals, it began to bleed. “We immediately had to make the call to do the surgery,” he recalls.
The singer was rushed to hospital to have the polyp removed. The standard period of rest and recovery after such an operation is two months. Jayant was back onstage in just over a fortnight, though he noticed his voice had changed.
“I’m able to sing how I used to back when I was 19!” he says proudly.
BLOODYWOOD – NU DELHI (Official Video) – YouTube 
Bloodywood have been running through Tadka for a few hours, so it’s time for a break. They chomp down on food they’ve ordered from a local highway restaurant: curries, biryani, naan. “Keep eating!” Karan orders exuberantly as they watch Raoul perform his raps for the camera.
It’s a fitting meal, given Tadka’s celebration of the diversity of Indian cuisine, especially home-cooked delicacies (‘Sizzle in the summer ’cos you know we like it hot / Rocking in the kitchen and we hitting like the pot’).
The cameras capture Jayant sweeping his arms like he’s throwing imaginary salt and masala as the rest of the band play behind him. But then India and its culture has always been central to who Bloodywood are. As well as a nod to their love of nu metal, Nu Delhi is obviously a reference to New Delhi, the country’s capital and the city the band call home.
“In terms of storytelling, we’re focusing more this time on where we come from, our culture and just us in general. It’s more about our story rather than a generic story,” says Karan.
The title track looks at how the city’s tough-love attitude shaped them, while Hutt is a fuck-you to bullies and Dhadak, Kismat and Bekhauf bristle with positivity (‘I take all the fear, blood, the sweat, the tear / Grind it in my mind and find another gear’ sings Raoul on the latter). Raoul reveals the album touches on the bandmembers’ personal side, but also broader themes such as colonialism and fighting against oppression.
“What we’re saying is that because you know what it was like for your ancestors to go through oppression, use your power to destroy the modern manifestations of those cycles now,” he says.
Equally important to the band are the traditional Indian sounds woven into their songs. Daggebaaz brings together bhangra influences, distinctive konnakol vocals, electronic/ hip hop flourishes and a deathcore-style beatdown.
The album really sees the band expanding the range of instruments they incorporate – Tadka includes a regal-sounding tutari horn, while elsewhere Nu Delhi features nagara drums, an esraj (a classical stringed instrument), and South Indian percussion in the form of the hand drum-like mridangam. Other instruments deployed by the band include the dhol, tumbi, tabla and santoor, and also, on Kismat, a sitar for the very first time.
“I think it’s the most amount of fun I have during the entire process,” says Karan. “Just looking for sounds and looking for new instruments.”
The band took almost a year off from playing live to focus on writing and recording Nu Delhi. Karan was anxious about whether people would forget about them in their absence, but the hard work Bloodywood have put in over the last few years has ensured the audience they built has been there for them now they have returned.
“The only thing you need to do is listen to your audience,” says Karan. “To make music that you like and your audience likes.”
It’s the end of a long day, and Bloodywood’s time in this grand hall is almost done. Equipment is packed away and food cleared up. But the work is only just starting. In a few weeks they’ll return to Europe for their Return Of The Singh tour ahead of the release of Nu Delhi, including a run of UK dates culminating in a show at London’s 2,300-capacity O2 Forum, their biggest headlining show yet outside of India. Where is all this leading? Bloodywood’s ambition is simple: to be India’s first truly globally successful band, and change perceptions – and misconceptions – of the country in the process.
“We want to get as far as possible and get as many people who are like-minded together, have a great time musically, but also create a community that can actually have an impact on the world,” says Raoul.
Bloodywood may have achieved more than any other Indian metal band, but it’s taken a lot of work to get to this point, not least for Karan.
“I have sacrificed my personal life, for sure, because this is all I do,” he says. “I don’t take vacations. I’ve stopped gaming. I stopped enjoying it because work was always on my mind.”
Jayant has no regrets about leaving his job as a talent booker to give Bloodywood his focus. “If it’s doing something I love, less money isn’t a problem. There isn’t steadiness in life, but it’s the price of what we’re doing, and I don’t mind paying that price.”
Nu Delhi is out now via Fearless. Order your exclusive Bloodywood bundle featuring the band’s Metal Hammer cover feature and an exclusive T-shirt design online now.
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