MUMBAI: ‘The Jewel of the East Coast’- Visakhapatnam, is the home-ground to pure heavy metal band -Against Evil, which has crossed boundaries for its love for metal music. In spite of coming from a city like Visakhapatnam, which is not very welcoming to the genre, the band, which formed in 2014, has already tasted a certain level of success.  

Part of that success includes the band’s single ‘War Hero’ being featured on the cover-mount compilation CD of this month’s Metal Hammer Magazine, along with bands like Trivium, Children Of Bodom, My Dying Bride, TesseracT and many more.

The four-piece band, consisting of Siri Sri Peddapalli (vocals /bass), Sravan Maturi Chakravarthi (vocals /guitar), Shasank Venkat Devulapalli (lead guitar) and Noble John (drums), released ‘War Hero’ in April this year, and was dedicated to the band members’ close friend Amar Gautham Annepu, who passed away in a tragic accident last year.

Although it has just been only a little over a month since Against Evil’s debut album – ‘Fatal Assault’ hit stores through Transcending Obscurity distribution, the album has managed to sell a decent number of copies till date. But more notably, their music has been played on German radio. The band has also received a little more international help in the form of Croatian designer- All Things Rotten, who helped design the album’s cover and artwork.

The band revealed that most of their international success has come through due to the support of Sahil Makhija – a guitarist, label owner and metal musician - and Kunal Choksi, owner of Transcending Obscurity. The turning point came when Against Evil approached Makhija for his PR services. “We approached Sahil Makhija to hire his PR services for our first single ‘War Hero’. We got great response for the single and that is when we decided to do an album,” confessed Devulapalli.

During the making of the album, Choksi contacted the band, showing interest to release its album through Transcending Obscurity distribution and the rest, as they say, is history.

On the live front, Against Evil has played a couple of shows in Visakhapatnam, and more recently the Houz of Blues, Hyderabad, and they hope to play many more. “We have put a lot of hard work into making this album and we hope it reaches out to rock and metal music listeners all over the word. Our plan is to keep playing wherever and whenever possible, and also to keep making more music,” Devulapalli added.

Genre-wise, the band is a heavy metal band in the broader sense, with elements of Trash and Hard rock. Judas Priest, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Accept, DIO, Black Sabbath and Metallica are a few of their influences.

Originally known as ‘Echo’ in 2009, two of the band’s members- Siri and Shasank, met back in 2007 through common friends and formed Echo with another two friends. In 2010 Sravan joined Echo, while John was added to the line-up in 2014 after the previous drummer quit. That was when Against Evil was born, with the intent to make original metal music.