Zygnema: Metal Gods

If you like your music dark and heavy, you’d be hard-pressed to find any band that does it better than Zygnema. If you’ve heard their incredibly high-energy live performances at one of the many music festivals or listened to their albums, Born Of Unity (2010) and What Makes Us Human Is Obsolete (2015), you can be sure that they are hard-core heavy/thrash/power metal gurus. They’re India’s only metal act that flawlessly packs venues on any given day.

Zygnema started out playing in college competitions to find a way to make their name. The band that presently consists of vocalist Jimmy Bhore, Sidharth Kadadi on guitars, Asxeem Dlean on bass and Mayank Sharma on drums, won accolades at the Rolling Stone Metal Awards in 2011 for Best Metal Band and Best Metal Song in the popular choice category, and also represented India at the Wacken Metal Battle at the Wacken Open Air in 2012. They were also winners of the Yamaha Asian Beat 2010 West Zone and All India Finals. The same year, they also won Best Drummer and Best Guitarist at Yamaha Asian Beat 2010 Global Finals (Thailand). Five years later they were once again adjudged by Rolling Stone Metal Awards 2016 for Best Album (Critics Choice) for their album What Makes Us Human Is Obsolete and Best Band (Critics Choice).

VERUS FERREIRA spoke to the band members to get a feel of how Mumbai’s metal veterans rock.

When and how was Zygnema formed? 
Sidharth: Jimmy and I had been struggling to get a sorted line since December 2005. We did not do too many shows as we always had an inclination towards writing original music. We struggled with a few drummers and bass players for a year and then somewhere in December 2006, we found Mayank and Ravi Sapute and this line was rock steady until February 2013 when Ravi moved to Prague. Leon took his place. The band was on a hiatus from August 2007 to October 2008 as Sidharth was pursuing education in LA. So technically the band started gigging seriously and writing more stuff from November 2008 onwards.

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