“It’s just one of those times,” Raghavan laughs. “It’s really busy at times. But because I really enjoy doing it, I always find a way to make it happen.”
The Fifths also have the benefit of experience. They’re not new to this game, winning acclaim as an uncompromising, full-bodied jam act willing to blend eastern and western styles.
They’ve played everything from major festivals to crowded Melbourne bars, amassing fans with each and every appearance. “We’ve been playing together as a band since early 2013, so a little while now, though we still like to think it’s early days,” guitarist Harsha says. “Over the last two years is when we’ve really gotten serious about starting to write some more songs and working towards putting together an EP. The first couple of years were about performing, and then the last two and a half years have been about putting out the singles.”
And what a set of singles. The band mix electronica, world music, dance, folk and even pop rock into an impossible to ignore package; producing anthemic, eminently danceable tunes like Bhoot and De Chamaat in the process. Indeed, their work is so unique – so skilful in its blending of cross-cultural sounds and tones – that you can recognise a song by The Fifths from the very first note.
But as effortless as their songs might sound, such gleeful, oversaturated singles are the product of hard work and effort. “The first few songs that we released a couple of years ago were much more experimental – that was about writing something and just seeing what would happen. But now we’re like, ‘Nope, we’ve found our sound and we know what people like listening to. This is what sounds real to us when we play it, and we enjoy playing it.’
“Lately our mantra has been, ‘Let’s road test it,’ – let’s take them out and test them out in the gig setting.’ We want to see which rhythms work better. Almost always, it changes the songs in a positive way. For example, one of the songs on the EP – Karvaan – had only Hindi lyrics, and an acoustic soundscape, but we made it a deep house track, added English lyrics, and we found people seemed to connect a lot more.”
As immaculately produced as the band’s singles might be, The Fifths are first and foremost a live act. That’s how they sharpened their teeth – playing festival after festival and show after show – and that’s how they seek to hone their skills moving forward, working hard to get heads moving and toes tapping, sharpening their songs to a fine point in the process.
“We pride ourselves on being a live band. We enjoy that aspect. So when we’re writing songs there’s two things: one, we don’t want the music to sound too electronic, because we want to do justice to it in the live setting. And secondly, we always want the song to be something that will make people dance,” says drummer AP.
The live setting also provides an opportunity for the Fifths to work out how to make their music work for the broadest audience possible. Their music is, after all, universal in the way that all good music is, and their open-hearted songs can be enjoyed and embraced by all. “We’ve been playing a lot of bandrooms around Melbourne and increasingly to a more Australian crowd. So we’ve had to work out how the music that we like to play works with non-Indians.” Harsha laughs. “Basically, we have learned that everyone loves to boogie. Which means we’ll always have an important job to do while on stage through our music.”
