Shreya Gajbhiye is the rare musician who’ll admit, out loud, how much she wants it. Most artists often hedge, they talk about the work, the craft, the process, anything but the naked ambition underneath. Gajbhiye, who records as Sick Industry, doesn’t bother with the hedge. “I think I can become a rock star in India,” she says early in our conversation, almost laughing at herself for saying it, but not taking it back either.
Early Impressions
She comes from a rock background and has spent years around the Indian indie circuit, including time playing in bands like Ladyship. But a lot of how she understands the scene goes back further, to her college years and a festival she had a front-row seat to. “It was basically like living in college and having a music festival in your backyard,” she says of Strawberry Fields, where she was also part of the organising side. It ran as a battle of the bands, which meant she was watching artists at every stage of their growth at once. “Koi Ranchi se aa raha hai, koi Bombay se aa raha hai,” she remembers. “People were committed to this, and you saw that.”
Seeing the same bands return across editions, she got to follow journeys in real time. Some of the acts she watched have since become some of the biggest names in the country. And watching them up close did something specific to her. The artists who were generous with their time stuck with her like TT from SKRAT, who she found approachable and giving with advice; the F-16s, who she still talks about with open reverence. Being that near to them collapsed the distance between fan and maker. “Seeing them as, oh, this is who they are on stage and this is who they are in person. They are a regular human being. I could be that person.” It’s a deceptively simple realisation, but it’s the one that turns a listener into someone who actually makes records.
Serious about a scene that isn’t
The funny thing is how seriously she takes all of it, and how aware she is of the absurdity. “Why am I serious about this really, really non-organised, non-formal industry?” she says. “Why am I so strategic about it?” She describes getting stressed at festivals when she can’t get to talk to people, feeling genuinely happy for whoever’s on stage while unable to shake the wish to be up there herself. “It’s a weird spectrum of feelings. But you are never out of it. Once you are in, you are in. Once you want rock and roll, you want it.”
Her relationship to the scene has shifted over time, too. Early on, she says, she was simply in awe of it. The more she put herself out there and spoke to people, the more she understood it as a scene in the literal sense, a web where everyone knows everyone, with adjacent bands and overlapping players that a casual listener never sees. Now she looks at it less as a spectator and more as someone with a stake in it.
The record
All of that feeling pours into Rust in the Economy, her self-funded debut EP as Sick Industry, produced by Amartya Ghosh. It’s five tracks of what she calls doomer pop, songs about trying to grow and get somewhere in a world that seems to be quietly falling apart. There’s pop songwriting at the centre of it, clean melodies and vocal hooks, but it’s roughed up with distorted guitars, heavy drums and a rocker’s flippancy in the writing. ‘Ultimate Simp Song’, the lead single, is the most fully realised thing on it, committing all the way to the pop-rock format. ‘Good News’ is where the doomer outlook gets most explicit, sitting with the discomfort of wanting to achieve inside a crumbling world, and ‘Spring Song’ strips everything back to acoustic and strings.
The EP is at its best when it commits to the collision of its two energies; it slackens a little in the stretches where it leans neither fully into rock nor pop. But the boldness of the attempt, and the worldview behind it, is what makes it worth sitting with.
Personal, and only just beginning
What’s striking is that she doesn’t frame the record as a product so much as something she needed to get out of herself. She talks about it as deeply personal, “it’s a whole story, it’s got characters” like the music video for ‘Ultimate Simp Song’, part of a wider visual element she’s making with a collaborator that she won’t quite call a movie but imagines playing like one.
That compulsion is even clearer when she talks about what’s coming next, a project she calls Exorcism of Sick Industry. She describes it less as a plan than as something pressing against her from inside. “I want to make it because I want to make it,” she says. “I want to listen to it.” There’s a particular song on it she needs to exist just so she can stop carrying the feeling inside it: “I need this to be external to me at this point of time.”
She called the whole pursuit a kind of last cry, “How can you ignore someone who is doing all this?” On the evidence of Rust in the Economy, and the way she talks about everything still to come, ignoring her would be a mistake.
