Peter Cat Recording Co. Have Been Waiting For You

On an amber-warm May evening in 2023, Peter Cat Recording Co. played their first-ever show in the dusty, shabby, too-dark A&R Bar—one of three venues stacked against each other on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio’s Arena District. The quintet had been rollicking around Delhi for the better part of a decade now, but their arrival in the Arch City was rewarded with a sold-out crowd. Peter Cat Recording Co. had never toured in North America before, but that string of gigs was a celebratory end-cap to 10 years of lineup changes, high streaming numbers and two great records, Portrait of a Time: 2010-2016 and Bismillah. Peter Cat make transnational music with an extravagant, filled-out wardrobe. One moment, they sound like space-rock cadets; in a flash, they’re alternating between heady thumpers and rapturous jazz ballads. It’s thoroughly puzzling and unquestionably resplendent.

Suryakant Sawhney stood at the front of the A&R stage, draped in a lighting that barely contrasted the room’s low-tinted ambiance. His bandmates—Karan Singh, Dhruv Bhola, Rohit Gupta and Kartik Sundareshan Pillai—were more silhouette than discernible figures, as an atmospheric field recording crunched into a horn arrangement that serpentined into “Bebe de Vyah. The concert melted into itself. Sawhney rarely bantered with the crowd, preferring to let his soulful warble shepherd songs like “Floated By,” “Portrait of a Time” and the eight-minute Everest, “Memory Box,” instead. It was like watching a phenomenon untangle on stage. To step into the Peter Cat Recording Co. world is to buy into their multi-dimensional oeuvre—a catalog fit for marriage ceremonies and sea-shanty songbooks near and far.

Before Peter Cat Recording Co. hit the States last spring, they’d been working on some new demos—having recorded four or five tracks in spaces across Goa and in Gupta’s studio in Delhi. “We were just waiting for this body of work to finish,” Sawhney says. “I guess it seems to take us at least four years.” Bismillah came out in 2019, and it’s racked up over 40 million streams since. The 2023 tour was so fruitful and full of discipline that it inspired the group to, after finishing their final gig in Vancouver in June, rent out a studio in Joshua Tree and develop a foundation for what would become their third LP: BETA. Taking the stage every night invoked deadlines, which helped Peter Cat amp up their already-anomalous chemistry with each other. “[The tour] gave us a schedule to follow, which I think is great,” Sawhney adds. “I think it was a relief to get those songs out of our system. By the time the tour ended, we’d also played together for such a while—and we’d hardly done so many shows together—that we were a good, tight unit at the end.”

When the band returned to Delhi, the anecdotes they all shared with their friends and family centered around those Joshua Tree sessions, and BETA now exists as a living, breathing document of those days. Sawhney calls their North America shows “a weird little dream.” “It was hard to really ingest what had happened,” he says. “And the way we are, we aren’t necessarily the most vocal about our excitement as a group. We just sort of take it in.” Gupta quickly mentions that there was a shooting in Columbus the same day Peter Cat played at A&R Bar, near their Airbnb. “We did tell everybody back in India that America is very unsafe,” Sawhney quips. “Don’t go to Columbus.”

Peter Cat Recording Co. haven’t played any shows since returning from Joshua Tree last summer, though they are scheduled to return to America with Khruangbin this fall. In the past, before Bismillah and during the era that Portrait of a Time captures, they weren’t turning clubs inside out nightly. The industry in India didn’t have the infrastructure in place for any sort of routine gigging culture. And, at this point in the band’s career, having a mantra of “let’s play every day” isn’t in the cards either, nor does it have to be. “I think it would have been nice, 10 years ago, to have that many options,” Sawhney admits. “That’s how a band gets really tight, just playing again and again—not necessarily practicing together but playing together live would have been really instrumental in that.” The North American tour was the first time Peter Cat ever played their own catalog so consistently. After two-dozen shows and nearly two months on the road, their alchemy was tighter than ever. It only makes sense that, in the immediate wake of that journey, they went into album mode and made their best record yet.

Album mode is, according to Gupta, three or four-week-long “camps” where the five musicians stay in the same place and make music together. It’s not uncommon for bands these days to have their membership spread out in different places, and Peter Cat Recording Co. are no stranger to that either. Gupta lives in another city, and even Sawhney is often someplace outside of India. Peter Cat’s time spent together is often condensed and incremental, but it never takes long for them to snap back into focus. “Everybody’s getting busy with their own life, so it’s figuring out how to carve the time out in your life and make it happen,” Sawhney says. 10 years ago, the band lived on the same street, running snake cables through vents and from room-to-room. It was, as Sawhney calls it, a real “DIY-what-the-fuck-is-going-on?” setup. “There was a routine of showing up and jamming,” he continues. “It wasn’t necessarily a planned thing. We were younger, so we had nothing to do. This was our life. We’d show up happy.”

Despite having over 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, the origin story of Peter Cat Recording Co. isn’t so well-known. Search the band online and you’ll get a vague response about Sawhney having a “spiritual awakening” in San Francisco in 2008 that made him decide to pursue music as a career. He met Singh at IILM University in Gurgaon, but after a year of classes he wanted to “get out of the country and experience something else.” “I came home and me and my mom spent one afternoon thinking about it, and I looked at the map and it seemed like San Francisco was as far away from Gurgaon as possible,” he says. “I had always seen that city as something I was romantically attracted to. I can’t remember what it was, but it might have been [because of] Stark Trek. There was some poetry I enjoyed. I just felt drawn to it.” Sawhney applied to art colleges in the Bay Area, got in, spent three years on the West Coast and then dropped out before his first senior year semester.

I ask Sawhney about what that spiritual awakening was all those years ago. “I did mushrooms, basically,” he replies. “It sounds so funny when you actually say it out loud, but it really was something like that for me. Up until then, I had never considered music as even a career option or ever taken it seriously. But, I had a couple of friends [in San Francisco] and we all did mushrooms together for the first time. It felt like some sort of floodgate had opened for me.” Sawhney is honest about having what he calls an “ego death,” and that something centrally shifted within him—but it wasn’t like that two-day, “everything is so beautiful, I understand everything now” afterglow that most people associate with psilocybin trips. “I did suddenly have clarity within myself,” Sawhney continues. “It was about inhibition and believing in whatever my mind was cooking up.”

In 2020, after Bismillah, the band moved into the same house together in Goa so the workflow could develop into something stronger and faster. Four out of five members holed up there for about three years, and Bhola and Gupta still live there. The band eventually rented out a small cottage in Goa. It was an old, abandoned place run by a priest who gave them permission to record there in the middle of the night. “We had mics in different rooms, in this empty-ass house, and it just sounded beautiful,” Sawhney says. Out of those sessions came “Flowers R. Blooming,” the seven-minute tidal wave of sitar, distorted vocals, electrostatic and a chugging tapestry of saxophone that is now regarded as the origin of BETA. “You always need something to hook onto and then build around, to see where it can go,” Sawhney continues. “That just felt like the correct starting point. There were songs made prior to that, but they didn’t feel like good launch points. [‘Flowers R. Blooming’] felt like it was cooked when we were finished.”

A lot of Peter Cat Recording Co.’s music is producer-driven. There is a songwriting process and a performing element, but so much of the band’s magic happens in the mixing and mastering phases. “A lot of it is sitting in a studio and figuring out how to engineer the song, in a hip-hop or electronic music sort of way,” Sawhney says. “Flowers R. Blooming” was an instance where everything happened live, and it was the track that gave Sawhney the motivation to want to go through with finishing BETA. “Suddenly” was just as consequential, as the band rented out a furniture showroom owned by one of their friends and set up a recording studio in it for a weekend. “It’s like playing in an IKEA,” Sawhney continues, laughing. “Our recordings depend on that sort of ambiance—something giving us that inspiration and capturing that space in a recording, as opposed to just a studio, which seems kind of stale. When those pieces start coming together, you start seeing the possibility of an album. And still, it’s difficult.”

But the band opted to christen this new era of their sound with “People Never Change,” a six-minute masterclass in direction that weaves in and out of jazz, orchestra, psych-rock, electronica, hints of disco and vocals from Sawhney that could very well be just as beautiful on a mid-2000s jazz-pop standard. It’s full-throttle vibes from the first note, and Sawhney’s voice ushers us across a soundscape made vibrant by Singh, Bhola, Gupta and Pillai. “I can walk away, spineless, pretend it’s a movie,” Sawhney sings. “I don’t want to face a crisis, or something that’s so real.” What is real, though, is how perfect “People Never Change” is, and Peter Cat saw its integration of sounds as a good way to tease BETA to the world. “Something I personally have hated is combining Punjabi and rock music most of the times we’ve thought about it,” Sawhney explains. “But in this one instance, it somehow worked. It felt like, ‘Okay, it feels like an announcement of itself. The lyrics are an announcement. The whole song is an announcement.’ It feels like the right way to come back into something and talk about the passage of time and the growth of a person or people.”

The Punjabi element is, as Sawhney puts it, “hard to digest, if you’re not used to listening to something like that.” “From a songwriting perspective, you challenge yourself,” he says. “‘Okay, I’ve never heard this in this context. Is it conflicting with my puritan approach to how the song should be?’ ‘This song is jazz, so let’s keep it jazz.’ ‘No, let’s screw it up here and there.’ These are the little things you can set for yourself to make it interesting and not just an imitation of a set template of the past.” It’s this union of experience and culture, though, that makes Peter Cat Recording Co. songs so splendidly juxtaposed. In their catalog, purity and filth co-exist, as does wealth and poverty. In “People Never Change,” Sawhney sings of being “an enemy of violence” until a bullet in the heart becomes kindness; “I don’t want to be a crowd, I just want to be a cloud,” he croons. “And I wanna see it work out.”

Everyone in Peter Cat Recording Co. has a multitude of roles. Aside from Sawhney being the de facto vocalist (though Pillai’s turn at the mic on “Foolmuse” is a hypnotic, longing gem), the rest of the band plug in and out of various instruments before settling into their main pieces—Bhola samples and plays bass, Singh tracks drums, Gupta helms the keys and trumpet, Pillai is a multi-instrumentalist who plays a combination of guitar, keys, trumpet and electronics. The band’s composition is radically different now than it was when they made Bismillah, though, as Gupta and Bhola had joined Sawhney, Pillai and Singh just two years prior but hadn’t yet hit their groove. “What they provided on Bismillah was far more limited as compared to [BETA], where they’re just fundamentally far more a part of it and contributed much more,” Sawhney says. “They’re also, I would say, better musicians.” With an arsenal of broader musical knowledge now at their disposal, Peter Cat can integrate their confidence and cockiness into a more symbiotic dispersal of responsibilities. They can take more chances as a band, and doing so offers someone like Sawhney more space to write lyrics rather than work on refined ingredients. “All these things just become possible,” Sawhney adds. “I might have a shell of an idea, and they can take it to a level where I can’t—and vice-versa.”

The music is often a verbose, enchanting manifestation of interpersonal events and energies. The band’s relationship with Bismillah is innately different now, if only because the passage of time has demanded as much of them. Sawhney manages his musical life in different acts, distilling one process through Peter Cat Recording Co. and another process through his solo music, both of which are continuations of who he is and what parts of himself he gives away in song. Even if it’s been five years since Bismillah, transitory life events take place in-between and get translated into another medium. But Sawhney admits that he is not a storyteller, that his songwriting is autobiographical to a fault and is why releases take so long to develop. “For me, life has to happen and then I have to respond to that. And, eventually, a song comes out of it,” he says. “The music is purely reflective. My life isn’t as exciting as Drake’s, where this is a different thing happening every week in his life. Their lives are [happening] at a fundamentally different pace, so their music and their lyrics reflect a much quicker, changing sort of life. In our case, I think it’s a slow transition—long, romantic periods; sad periods; happy periods. They eventually manifest themselves.”

I came to Peter Cat Recording Co.’s music in 2022, through word-of-mouth recommendations and Spotify algorithms. While many American musicians use platforms like TikTok to reach more audiences, the app is currently banned in India. Sawhney knows that social media can deliver an initial burst of popularity or exposure to an artist, but he knows that no band can invent a formula for going viral or breaking out. “You better have the body of work to back it up or you’ll vanish again,” he says. “You better be really good and keep the consistency going. Now, at our stage, we’re playing a really long game and building a body of work here which, over time, will work itself out. Doing something is obviously relative, right? Sometimes what you consider awesome is not what the zeitgeist is looking for, but there’s always something. Then, you look at it and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we should have done that. That was a great idea.’”

This summer, one user on Reddit questioned why Peter Cat Recording Co. hadn’t “blown up” yet, and another user claimed it’s because “they perform in English in a country where most people don’t understand the language.” It’s a thin response attempting to sum the luck and trends of a music industry up into an assumption that Indian people cannot comprehend Peter Cat’s music, and therefore Peter Cat aren’t yet success stories. Not only does India have the second-largest population of English language speakers in the world, but Peter Cat’s music is remarkably global. They did sell out every date on that inaugural North American tour last year, after all. “In America, there’s so much competition,” Sawhney says. “In India, we had the luxury of being one of the only people doing it, and we did it reasonably well, so that helped. But, that also came with the backwardness of there not being an audience large enough to really make it as big a deal as you would hope. I think that gave us a platform, and then America was just organic.”

The band is currently releasing their music in America via Muddy Water Records, a label based in both New York and Los Angeles. “At some level, I would say the maximum number of listeners we have are in LA,” Sawhney says. “So, regardless of whether people listen to our music in India, it has still traveled its way to what is still considered the seed of the music industry, at least in America. This shit plays out, but you better be ready for when that moment comes.” But if Sawhney had to offer an objective response to whether or not his band has missed that moment he speaks of, he argues that Peter Cat Recording Co. has maybe suffered from not having a consistent release schedule. “I would argue it’s an important aspect of our time, being in the public consciousness a bit more,” he continues, “unless you’re one of the one-in-a-million, incredible artists who make that one album and it works for you for seven, eight years and you make a living off of it. Maybe that’s the trajectory we’re trying for, anyway.”

But Peter Cat Recording Co. are hesitant to enter that headspace, because the discussion can take many directions after. “You’re like, ‘Is it just because of where we are and who we are? Or is it because of how the world plays out? Is it the zeitgeist? Is our music just not there yet? Is it the wrong time to listen to this kind of music?’ There’s so many factors for that,” Sawhney says. “Sometimes it’s just the right place at the right time.” And, in many ways, Peter Cat seized that “right place, right time” opening. They never followed in anybody’s footsteps. If they had, they’d, according to Sawhney, “already be too late.” While Peter Cat are definitely not the “last band in India” anymore, being a mouthpiece for a music scene not yet fertilized has opened the door for them taking the risks that have led to songs like the nu-disco, techno-clutter ascending from the ashes of shoegaze on “Black and White,” or the film school-imbued folk cosmos of “Control Room.”

“I would say that’s the prerequisite to becoming a successful band, that you actually [take risks],” Sawhney adds. “The only thing I think people really respect and people actually follow is some sort of originality or uniqueness. That originality or uniqueness doesn’t mean that you’re amazing at what you do or you’re the best at what you do. It means that you’re incomparable and you’re singular. Ultimately, that’s the goal. You can be competing with other musicians, but you have to create an absolutely irreplaceable, singular version of what you are, which can’t be found anywhere else. If you can do that, you will always find a market. There’ll always be people ready to listen to you.”

Over the years, Peter Cat Recording Co. have been called everything from a “funeral band” to a “wedding band” to a “psychedelic occasions band.” On BETA, many of the songs reckon with change, told through the lenses of marriage, anti-capitalism, parenthood and aging. They’re keen on calling themselves a “daddy band” now, which makes sense, given that there were around five potential album titles at play and Singh’s son picked BETA. Left behind were “Darlings,” “Silver River Children” and “Climax”—names that Sawhney claims were “all pretty average.” But, in truth, the band wanted to name their new record BETA all along, and it was a serendipitous coincidence that Singh’s son picked the name everyone wanted—a name that, in Hindi, translates to “son.” It’s a fitting label for an album made by five musicians who are all progeny of their craft, students of a multiverse of sounds fused into a provocative, mesmeric singalong spanning an hour. “Beautiful life, lives in my mind,” goes the final verse on the album. As BETA washes over you one last time, Peter Cat are still chasing after a resolution.

Sawhney says that making BETA took everything out of the band. Given that Peter Cat’s sound is its own genre, community, scene and invention all at once, exhaustion sounds like a sacrifice required of any project that’s hellbent on remaining in-tune with the consequences of originality. There’s a price to pay for being unique, and destiny came to collect when Peter Cat had to wait four years to play the songs from Bismillah live. Sawhney and his bandmates make dioramas out of their albums, collaging picturesque grooves with strange turns of melody that make the horizon line wiggle. Of course producing music that sounds as much like a Masayoshi Takanaka pastoral as it does a Coltrane rewiring takes time. BETA is as sentimental as it is gorgeously new. I ask Sawhney if it is the final Peter Cat Recording Co. album. “I don’t think so,” he laughs. “That’s what we said years ago, as well.”

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.