KASCK are gearing up for their debut album with a fan-powered anthem, “Be Quick or Be Dead.” The band drives the vision, the crowds fuel the fire, its chorus is chanted by Kasckheads (the fandom of KASCK) from around the world, stitched from fan-submitted clips after the song became an interactive live moment. Musically it’s super fast and groovy, lyrically it still cuts deep, one of KASCK’s most rewarding ideas to date. We sat down with Mayank, the band’s singer, to talk about how this communal energy came together, why inclusivity hits so hard, and what it means for their first full-length.

The beginnings

The band was formed more than 10 years ago by a few high school kids who wanted to play heavy metal music.  We jammed Metallica, Slayer, Obituary, Kreator, Carcass, and all those bands… Soon after, we got inspired to write our own music and got encouraged to do so from our local friends.  This is how the band started, then we had a couple of line-up changes over the years. Now the band consists of me as the frontman, Vishal Prabhu as the Bassist, and the most recent addition, Rahul Singh, on drums.

Behind the name

When we first started, everyone in the band was excited about the task of finding a suitable name for our band. We wanted something that wasn’t just a “cool-sounding” title. So, one time, we were asked to play a show out of our town, and we still did not have a name. Somehow, this word, Cask, surfaced, and it seemed like it was waiting for us to pick, and we did the most obvious thing a thrash metal band would do, which is replace ‘C’ with a ‘K’ and add another ‘c’ to cask. That’s how KASCK as a name was curated.

Inspiration

There is some appeal to heavy metal, which is not easy to describe but qualities such as it being raw, aggressive, honest, and unapologetic. But with the most positive meanings behind the songs, there is something that gravitates certain types of people towards it, and we are that kind. So lyrically you can see this honesty in all of our songs, most of our songs come from the spiritual and philosophical side of Mayank, who is always behind the questions which actually matter, like what is life, what is the meaning behind all of this, one day we are conscious and majority of us don’t even question and just continue to play the game. If you listen to the songs like “Deal with the Devil” and “A Thousand Deaths” from our previously released EP, you’ll understand why we say this. A lot of our new songs from the upcoming album go beyond this and ask even more overlooked, but uncomfortable questions.

We also have very strong opinions on the political, religious, and other societal agendas, and we do not hesitate to talk about them, for example, “Death to the Crooked” from our EP.

When it comes to the music writing part, we have been a band which jams together in the garage and that’s how we have written most of our songs until now but the process keeps on changing with the line up changes, that being said, we are a riff band, and it’s always a riff which comes to life before anything else and after that everything else is added.

KASCK‘s music in 5 words

Meaningful, genuine, aggressive, inclusive, here-to-stay.

Fun facts

Over the years, we have played at some really weird places, especially when we were first starting out. We just won’t say no to any opportunity to play live, and it has led us to perform at places you won’t expect a metal band to play, some college festivals, school festivals, and even shopping complexes and malls. Playing to the audience, which had absolutely no clue about what metal is, and seeing those reactions from the normies, is quite funny. Another fun fact – Vishal, our bass player, is turning 47 this year. He gets butted a lot for his age (in a fun way).