Listening to Peter Cat Recording Co is to be transported into a musical world without a sense of fixed time or place. The group’s funk-inflected guitars and warm reverb of humming basslines might recall a West Coast ‘70s analogue feel, while their sharp trills of strings could take us to the ‘80s disco, crooning vocals to the Vegas strip of the ‘50s and buzzing synth lines into the globalised 21st Century. You might be forgiven for thinking you are listening to a lesser-known, rediscovered band from mid-20th Century America or a young British indie group seeking to emulate the sounds of their predecessors. The reality, however, is more unexpected.
First forming in 2009 and releasing their debut album, Sinema, in 2011, Peter Cat Recording Co are an Indian band. Originally based in Gurgaon and Delhi, the five-piece group have found global fame since the release of their 2019 breakthrough album Bismillah and have completed multiple tours in recent years throughout Europe, Asia and the US. With their latest album, 2024’s BETA, they have expanded their sound to encompass everything from Punjabi pop melodics to guitar distortion, futuristic synth sounds and psychedelic indie folk, yet their music is always instantly recognisable thanks to the husky warmth of frontman Suryakant Sawhney’s vibrato-laden voice. Now marking 15 years as a band, Peter Cat Recording Co have cemented their status as perhaps the first and only Indian guitar band to find international success.
“We’re outliers,” Peter Cat Recording Co founder Sawhney says. “I'm not sure we even exist within the music industry or culture in general. I’ve always found myself drawn to being outside the system, never participating in trends but just doing what feels right for us.”
Operating in an Indian music industry better known for its Bollywood playback singers, regional hip-hop scenes and DJs rather than guitar-wielding bands, PCRC was certainly an outlier when Sawhney first came up with the moniker for his debut musical project in 2008.
“I had no intentions of being a musician,” Sawhney explains. “I only really discovered it when I was turning 22 or 23.” Inspired by the soulful voice of Sam Cooke and the vocal dexterity of playback artist Mohammed Rafi, Sawhney had found an aptitude for singing with a wavering, mature timbre as a teen but it wasn’t until he was studying as a filmmaking student in San Francisco in his early twenties that he began to take music more seriously. While on a break from college, he returned home to Gurgaon and began working on demos for the PCRC project by stitching together atmospheric instrumentals with the jazz inflections of his singing voice. The name, he explains, stuck with him after he went to a Calcutta restaurant called Peter Cat and then added Recording Co to give the moniker an enigmatic, business-like quality.
Following his graduation, Sawhney returned to India for good and enlisted a quartet of local musicians, including drummer Karan Singh who still plays in the band today, to flesh out his ideas. The group began to jam and landed on the blend of cabaret-style instrumentation, jazz swing and pop melodies that can be heard on the eight tracks of Sinema. At first glance the album is an unusual proposition, stitching together a nostalgic collage of references from the waltzing swing and Tony Bennett-style soaring harmonies of opening track “Pariquel” to the Django Reinhardt jazz strumming of “The Clown on the 22nd Floor”, the introspective Jarvis Cocker-style singer-songwriting of “Love Demons” and searing rock guitars of “Tokyo Vijaya”. It’s an unruly mix that leaps across genre boundaries but manages to cohere through the sheer energy of Sawhney’s performance and distinctly nonchalant delivery.
Releasing the album on 1 January 2011 through Bandcamp, with downloads initially priced at a tongue in cheek $2000 before dropping down to a more typical $10, the record wasn’t exactly an overnight hit. Rather, the band spent the best part of the next seven years playing DIY shows across India and recording new material to self-release, including 2012’s demo-heavy Wall of Want, 2015’s second album proper Climax and 2016’s Transmissions, which was the result of a project that saw the group writing, recording and producing a new song every week for two months.
“We had many moments during our early years of playing shows,” Sawhney says. “We threw parties, played to random empty restaurants and much more. Those gigs were all chaotic, messy and noisy. I think people often came to see me get drunk and hold it together while singing!”
Amid the chaos, the group had carved out a distinct reputation for raucous live performances that could whip moshpit frenzies out of songs that might otherwise seem best-suited to background play at classy cocktail bars. Their Indian fanbase was steadily growing and by 2018 a change of personnel saw Sawhney and drummer Singh enlist a younger duo of bassist Dhruv Bhola and keys and horns player Rohit Gupta to join existing member guitarist and trumpeter Kartik Sundareshan Pillai. Having solidified the new lineup that has persisted until today, Peter Cat Recording Co were approached by French indie label Panache to put out a compilation of their tracks to date.
The resulting album, 2018’s Portrait of a Time, acted as a watershed moment marking the end of the band’s first iteration. It also heralded what would become their debut international success with the release of 2019’s Bismillah.
“In hindsight, the pandemic proved to be a pivotal point for us, allowing people to discover Peter Cat Recording Co's music at home,” Sawhney says. “It happened mainly through algorithms and word of mouth.”
Indeed, with Bismillah released in June 2019 and their extensive 2020 tour swiftly cancelled owing to the arrival of the Covid 19 pandemic, it was during the ensuing lockdowns that a serious international audience were first alerted to the band’s work. Drawn to the easygoing swing of trumpet-heavy tracks like “Floated By”, the ethereal vocal sample melodies of “Memory Box,” the organ-laden ‘70s groove of “Heera” and the uptempo, buoyancy of “Soulless Friends,” it seemed listeners around the world were finding comfort in the enveloping and retro-referencing sound of Peter Cat Recording Co while the world around them was increasingly uncertain.
Once gig venues began opening up again and lockdown rules eased, the band finally began their cancelled tour and saw it soon expanded to include their first US shows where they were surprised to find crowds who weren’t all South Asian diaspora. “We had a very gradual ascent and only after playing our first shows in the US did we realise our audience had grown significantly. I think the most fulfilling aspect of it all has been to play to a diverse fanbase,” Sawhney says. “It's great to see that we're not attracting just a South Asian base but people of all creeds and colours. That was the goal all along.”
Touring as a headline act and as openers for Texan trio Khruangbin in the following years, PCRC have since established a key fanbase in the US and Europe and become one of the few groups that is currently making tours financially viable in an increasingly hostile landscape of soaring costs. In recent years, artists such as rapper Little Simz, singer Santigold and the group Animal Collective have all cancelled dates owing to financial pressures, yet PCRC have managed to continue. “Touring as a band is a prohibitively expensive ordeal at this point and it's not getting easier,” Sawhney comments. “We’ve been one of the few bands who have managed to make it work but the old adage that the rich get richer still applies. Starting a band now and trying to build a career especially if you're not mega successful immediately is soul-crushingly difficult.”
The economics might be progressively difficult but in terms of sheer creativity, the group seems to have had a positive knock-on effect in India. Where they had once called themselves “one of the last few bands remaining in India,” Sawhney now sees the homegrown industry developing and maturing into a new health. “The music industry in India is taking off in general. Many larger labels or organisations have entered the market and tend to get involved with many artists at an early stage,” he says. “What's important is that more people are open to making music, buying tickets and going to shows and this is a marked shift from when we started over a decade ago. Now, I want us to be the sort of group where when anyone sees us play, they feel inspired to go home and start a band of their own too!”
As the scene develops, so have PCRC been equally changing their sound. 2024’s BETA, named after the birth of Singh’s child, saw the group create a record out of a patchwork process of sessions in Goa and California’s Joshua Tree, producing 13 tracks that meander beautifully through the bhangra percussion and pop euphoria of “People Never Change,” the wall of sound distortions of “Connexion” and the tender jazz balladry of “A Beautiful Life”. Sawhney’s vocal is still central, although a deeper, time-worn tone comes to the fore now as if his decades of touring and recording experience are speaking through the microphone.
As a solo artist, Sawhney has also been experimenting with electronic music and he released two propulsive, dancefloor-focused albums under the moniker Lifafa in 2019 and 2021. “I’m actually getting much more focused on this project now,” he says. “It’s become my playground to explore ideas and I want to put out a new record in the next year or two.” He is also working in the fashion space, having recently soundtracked the London Fashion Week show for his friend Sanjay Garg’s brand Raw Mango, and is splitting his time between London and Goa, moving to the former with his filmmaker wife to facilitate her documentary projects.
With the world seemingly at their feet and their inspirations as freewheeling as ever, what is the next frontier to conquer for the group?
“The band currently exists between Goa, Faridabad and London and recently we all took a break from PCRC completely as the last few years were so intense and we burnt out,” Sawhney says. “There is always a long conveyor belt of music being recorded and worked on, though. The question is where we want to go with it but I’m sure our big record is still due.” Wherever shape or indefinable sound it might take, the only certainty is that with their vast successes to date, Peter Cat Recording Co are outliers no more.
