Early February last year, I attended the album listening party for The Down Troddence's new record, 'As You All Know This Is How It Is', AYAKTIHIS. One song stopped me mid-conversation: Malayalam lyrics on screen, the phrase "ellam ellam jaathi" (everything is caste) repeating like a mantra. Upper-dominant caste surnames were called out one by one, Warrier, Nambiar, Nambeessan, Pillai, Menon, all of it riding dark synths, heavy riffs, and guttural growls. It was confrontational in a way I hadn't anticipated. Not many Indian metal acts have tackled these themes so directly. 'Ejjathi' the band's first song written entirely in Malayalam, is the album's gut punch. Vocalist Munz wrote it from personal experience, targeting caste discrimination despite economic mobility, rituals, the casual cruelties of the marriage market with acerbic anti-caste commentary. The music video features the band storming a matrimonial office and is the most direct anti-caste metal song to emerge from India.

But the band’s striking musical and visual language is definitely not without precedent. Their 2014 debut, 'How Are You? We Are Fine, Thank You' (long titles are a trademark) introduced them as a groove metal band with strong folk inflections and explicitly radical politics. The opener ‘A.V.’ honors A. V. Kunjambu, a communist leader and freedom fighter central to Kerala's anti-feudal Karivellur struggle and ‘Forgotten Martyrs’ circles a similar history. Their single ‘Shiva’ drew from the origin story of Pottan Theyyam, a ritualistic art form from Malabar, using it to interrogate what happens when the marginalised are made into gods rather than given justice.

In 2019, they released ‘Fight. React. Be a Part!’ in direct opposition to the CAA/NRC laws. Clearly, the band has never been shy about where it stands. While their older peers Avial and Motherjane and contemporaries like Thaikkudam Bridge, reshaped what Indian rock could sound like, TDT did the same for South Asian metal, grounding it in their soil and folk tales with a sharp critical lens. AYAKTIHIS extends that project further than anything they've done before.

A prime example of this is, ‘Monsoon in Kannur’, the band’s artistic pinnacle. At nearly nine minutes, it is the album's most fully realised piece of writing: opening with rainfall, building slowly through orchestral sound design, transitioning into crushing polyrhythmic riffs to a vast out-of-body soundscaping musical experience. The meticulously crafted music video, featuring actress Anarkali Marikar as Gaia, is violent and beautiful in equal measure, framing the whole thing as an ecological reckoning. The graphic violence in the video turns its lens towards the band members themselves, showing that when nature finally retaliates, even the most well-intentioned voices aren’t spared.

There are moments where the album draws heavily from the contemporary modern metal sound. ‘Binary Sun’ and ‘Seven’ are TDT at their most djent-ified, with sprawling, cosmically grand tracks brought to life by AJ Blend's stunning animated visuals. The production places them squarely within a familiar contemporary metal grammar, and the visual language leans heavily on something Tesseract or Animals as Leaders would create. I'm not complaining; the line between homage and imitation is one the band walks more carefully on some tracks than others.

Now, speaking of balance, ‘Maharani’ featured carnatic vocalist and activist T.M. Krishna's voice placed against TDT's wall of sound. The song draws from the Palestinian struggle and broader systemic violence, and Krishna, who has spent years challenging the class and caste hierarchies embedded in classical music spaces, is not an incidental feature.

The Indian metal scene has evolved fascinatingly over the last decade, shifting from Western imitation toward something distinctly South Asian. Mumbai's Scribe pioneered this, blending metal and hardcore with a consciously Indian tone and references. Acts like Demonic Resurrection and Zygnema reinvented themselves, while prog-fusion Carnatic acts like Pineapple Express and Project Mishram pushed further into experimentation. At the pinnacle is Bloodywood, the behemoth of Indian metal, having opened for Linkin Park. Their success, however, might have created pressure to treat "Indian-sounding" elements as formula, something Skyharbor's masterful prog metal album Guiding Lights proves is entirely unnecessary. In this context, The Down Troddence is undoubtedly among the finest of these homegrown rock and metal acts of the country.

TDT have shared stages with Tom Morello and Marty Friedman, and their live performances are an experience unto themselves, with stunning visuals that are matched perfectly to the intensity of the music. The clear-cut reason TDT stands apart is their very razor-cut socio-political messaging combined with impeccable musical craft. They are making metal that could only have come from where they are, who they are, and what they are angry about. With five more tracks still to be revealed from AYAKTIHIS, it's hard not to wonder what else the record holds.

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