Bengaluru four-piece Maneating Orchid have built “Cosmic Shroud” without a single bar of 4/4 in it, and the song still moves like something you could nod to in a basement. It’s the second track on the band’s forthcoming third album “Cold Logic“, out June 5 on Subcontinental Records, and we’re hosting the video premiere today.
Picture a wild collision of Meshuggah’s mechanical churn, unorthodox jazz patterns and the chaotic hardcore wing of mathcore. Spread-triad chord shapes that flicker between tonal centres. Drums that switch from groove to blastbeat without warning. A chorus that goes cold and dissonant the moment you reach for it.
The main motif started life when guitarist Vinay Prasad was running through spread triad exercises, chromatic notes and widely spaced arpeggios that, in the band’s words, “create a very disorienting effect. It’s hard to tell where the tonal centre is, and it keeps the tension high.” That tension snaps in the explosive sections that follow, before a distorted variation of the opening motif circles back.
The arrangement was locked in early, except for one element. “The arrangement was pretty much set in stone from day one, except for the trash can ending, which felt like a perfect release of tension to end the song,” the band say, noting it also doubles as a clean transition for live sets. The push-and-pull runs through the whole track: jagged guitars on top, drums, bass and vocals working a grounded syncopated feel underneath, the chorus “grand, cold, and dissonant with a vocal line that feels all-consuming.”
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The band call the feel “pfunky,” a portmanteau of punky and funky. “There is a lot of tension and release, along with recontextualising motifs through changing rhythms (metric modulation, for the music nerds). Also, it should be noted that there isn’t a single 4/4 section in the entire song, yet anyone can move or headbang to it. This is probably the closest thing we have to a radio single, but it is just about cacophonous enough to avoid the airwaves.”
The video, shot by Angad Patil and Joshua Quadros and edited by Patil, takes its cue from one line in the lyrics: “Objects seem to vanish and re-emerge.” The band phase in and out throughout the runtime, sometimes appearing in different lineup combinations, at one point swapping places to play each other’s instruments. “We wanted to create a sense of disorientation where continuity breaks down, and things don’t behave the way you expect them to,” they say. The collaboration with Patil and Quadros goes back, both are long-time friends of the band.
Lyrically the song starts with a spacecraft passing through a strange nebular anomaly and shifts almost immediately inward. Warped bulkheads and failing onboard systems give way to memory instability, language becoming incomprehensible, consciousness falling out of sync with reality. The closing image of “unbirth” reads as a reversal of identity, the point where the self no longer holds together. Vocalist Kaushal LS works that arc into the delivery, moving from “cold, cybernetic statements of bleak fact to rabid shrieks of ferocity.”
The influences feeding “Cosmic Shroud” go well beyond death metal. The band point to Bad Brains for the hardcore punk energy, The Strokes and Daft Punk for the four-on-the-floor grooves buried inside the chaos, and John Zorn for the song’s late-stage detour into “jazz metal” territory: a laid-back swing ride pattern and a walking bassline running underneath dissonant chords and blast beats.
The Gorguts and Mico that Vinay was listening to during the writing sessions accounts for the heavier dissonance across the rest of “Cold Logic” as well.
“Cold Logic” is Maneating Orchid’s third full-length, following 2022’s “Hive Mind” and 2019’s “Miasma”, and the first with new drummer Vishnu Reddy. Compared to the earlier records, the band describe the new one as less technical and a lot more aggressive, with uneven song forms and more depth in the writing.
They’ve leaned harder into dissonant passages and pulled more heavy punk into the writing than on previous releases. Eleven tracks, 34 minutes, themes circling cosmic dread, deep space isolation, post-human transformation, and the horror of confronting a reality stripped of narrative.
Recording was spread across multiple rooms. Drums and vocals at Sugarline Sound Co. Guitars and bass at Altered Harmony Studio. Percussion captured by Ankit Ranganathan. Aakash Sherpa mixed and mastered the album at Anomaly Audio. Cover art by Acid Toad. Merch and CD design plus the inlay layout by Kaushal LS. Logo and the Void Engine illustration by Jigmet Wangchok. Rohit Chaturvedi guests on additional gang vocals on “Binary Contagion.”
The band is: Kaushal LS (vocals, lyrics), Rahil Ahmed (bass), Vinay Prasad (guitars, harmonium, additional vocals), Vishnu Reddy (drums, percussion).
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