The call begins almost like any other unfiltered conversation between friends, except this time it is across time zones and sleep schedules. One of them had just woken up, another counting down to bedtime, and somewhere in between, music quietly holds them together. That is the rhythm of Khatth Band, where Aditya Atmakuri, Ashutosh Verma, and Satyam Nayak are constantly negotiating distance, time and life, yet finding their way back to music that feels deeply personal and disarmingly simple. With Bewaqt and Woh quietly finding their way into people’s playlists and lingering there, the band finds itself reflecting on the music they are making, the journeys that shaped it, and everything that unfolds in between.
For Satyam, Hyderabad continues to shape his musical sensibilities in subtle ways. Offering context, he shares, “It has helped a lot because I really love the language and the dialect that the city speaks, and I like Old City where they speak a different Hindi. I really love that vocabulary, and it helps write the song.” He further adds, “The city also holds some of their most important memories. We had a show in Hyderabad, and just before that we saw each other dancing instead of singing for the first time. The three of us had regrouped after a year, we performed at a cafe after recording a song. We recorded again, went to Mumbai, and Hyderabad became our rebirth, living together, enjoying haleem, tea, and old Hyderabad.”
Talking about how Woh came together in a way that feels almost accidental, yet inevitable. Setting the context, Ashutosh recalls how the song took shape after a long creative pause, saying, “I wrote Woh after a long time of not writing, and I do not remember what came first, but I had a melody I had recorded years ago as a simple hum. The idea was it should end with Woh. I kept revisiting it until one day, while playing guitar, it came together, the lyrics, the meter, everything, and within 30 minutes the song was done, after which I sent it to Aditya and Satyam.”
Speaking about their songwriting, the band keeps it grounded in lived experiences, but not always in obvious ways. They share, “I think while being in college together, we all went through a rush of emotions, and it became about etching our feelings into words, which made everything easy to come up with. There is also this irony that before everything goes public, we want to protect and savour that moment. It was not just my experience, our songs came from us, our friends and family, and while not all were sad, we remember the ones that stayed with us longer.”
Ashutosh builds on that honesty by explaining their approach to simplicity, saying, “I think when it comes to songwriting, mostly songwriters put out their personal experiences and those become big hits, but for us, what worked was the people that we collaborated with, and because all three of us are really good friends, which gives our songs that special touch.”
They further admits that they do not chase complexity, but rather aim for something that feels real and familiar.