New Delhi based progressive heavy metal outfit ‘Trigger’ released their latest single titled ‘Hacktivist’ on 14th October 2020 worldwide. The new single is a hard-hitting reminder of the angry and heavy sound that has come to define Trigger through the years.
The new single attempts to express the agony of the down-trodden through a technically and vocally experimental sound, while preserving the grit that goes with Trigger’s reputation. It narrates the story of a pupil which has initiated an uprising against an authoritarian regime and its journey of exposing the horrors of such dictatorship through hacktivism. The track ends with the phrase, “Terrorism with a vision, Hacktivists are who we are”, and to convey that power could only have been taken back by terrorizing and disrupting…. kill.
The artwork, which has been masterfully hand sketched by illustrator Siddharth Iyer, shows a huge headless figure connected to a collective conscience. The headless figure represents the governed and the power of common will and resolve. The politicians who are shown as dwarfed figures in front of the headless figure represent governments bowing down before its master, the people. This action is the representation of how a successful democracy should work. When asked about how Siddharth came up with the artwork, he says “The first reference that came to my mind almost immediately, was the last portrait of Bahadur Shah Zafar before the Sepoy mutiny in 1857. Everything about how calm he looks in the painting, his ostentatious garb and how imposing his presence is in comparison to his surroundings, fit in perfectly with the ‘non-person’ entity we had in mind for the drawing.” On the theme of the song, he add “Digital protest or ‘armchair activism’ as its mockingly called, is criticized time and time again for not being an effective means of consolidation as opposed to real on ground activism. But of course, movements like the Anti CAA protests only proved that these two avenues can and should work hand in hand in times like these. The hacktivist, in this utopian world, represents each and everyone behind a screen. Capable of creating real on ground change. Making their leaders eventually bow to them and not the other way round”
‘Hacktivist’ is not the band’s debut release. Trigger has released songs in the past, the last one being about 3 years ago. About the hiatus, Ashwin Ramanathan, the band’s lead guitarist says “For us, making metal music in Trigger isn’t like work. We do it whenever we get time and/or are inspired to write. I know people expect a band to stay active all the time, but unfortunately the metal scene in India doesn’t have that many opportunities for us. Hence most of us have our day jobs. In any case, we do this for ourselves and not to make anyone else happy. So to cut short, we don’t think of it as a hiatus. We release music whenever we’re fully satisfied with the material, and of course when we have the time (The pandemic sure helped with the time). That being said, we definitely were missing releasing new material, and will be doing a lot more of that in the near future.”
