They’re possibly one of the best contemporary rock music acts to emerge from Pakistan. The rock outfit Karakoram broke on to the music scene with a thundering roar sometime in 2018. Their debut song, Toofaan, was a hard-hitting, gritty, classic rock anthem that harked back to the days when rock and metal dominated the underground and mainstream music scene.

Much like other contemporary musicians of singer-songwriter (and frontman of Karakoram) Sherry Khattak’s generation, the band’s music is inspired by that of American rock giants such as the Foo Fighters and Linkin Park.

The band consists of Sherry Khattak, along with Umer Lahooti on lead guitars, Omair Farooq on the bass guitar and Bilawal Lahooti on drums. They are also a part of the house band of the popular music show Nescafe Basement and are also the ‘band’ for a variety of other well-established acts from Pakistan’s music industry, including the likes of Call, Farhan Saeed, Meesha Shafi etc. They’re also featured in various other projects by musician-producer Xulfiqar Jabbar Khan as well, including songs featured in Pepsi Battle of the Bands and some of the recent Pakistan Super League anthems.

Karakoram announced last year that they’d they’d spent the coronavirus lockdown(s) putting their heads down and working on their debut album. “[These are] dark times indeed,” the band wrote on their YouTube channel back then. “However, our itch to create got the better of us and, although we can’t really reveal what we’ve actually been working on so hard for you all, we can give you a small gift in these dark times.”

Karakoram’s latest release, Bekhudi, is a traditional hard rock lament about the hypocrisies of life

That ‘gift’ was called Ailaan-e-Jang [Proclamation of War]. While the full album (mostly audio only) is out on the band’s Facebook and YouTube channels, at the time this piece went into print, it was oddly missing from Patari, which is one of the more popular music platforms in Pakistan. Ailaan-e-Jang also features their debut hit single, Toofaan, among other previous releases.

Bekhudi [Rapture], the latest music video from Ailaan-e-Jang to feature on their platforms is the fifth song in the album. It’s a simple black and red performance-based video with a bit of distortion or blurriness in the frames. The song itself has been written by Sherry Khattak and Bilal Haider.

From the the start to the very end, Bekhudi evokes, nay screams of nostalgia — about the late 90s-early 2000s era of rock music. It’s the kind of song Pakistani rock music aficionados would approve of and enjoy. There is no electronic music synchronisation, this isn’t a retro-rock pop song where an ‘older’ sound has been given a modern spin. Bekhudi is how rock music was done before — all the instrumentation is, for lack of better word, ‘real’. This includes the drums, the bass and the electric guitars.

In terms of structure, it’s a regular rock song, where the opening and in-between lyrics are sung in Sherry Khattak’s somewhat very well-trained voice before he launches into a style popular in the era Karakoram’s music evokes — screamo. In screamo, the artiste makes a mix of a growl (guttural) and a scream when singing. In Bekhudi it provides a contrast between the angsty chorus and the verses preceding the chorus.

The song opens with: Ye beyrang zindagi mein kyun uljhay rahein/ Ye ankahi baaton ka kyun yaqeen karein/ Kyun iss daldal mein hum dhastay yun rahein/ Kyun iss jhoot ko sab zindagi kahein

[Why are we caught up in this colourless world/ Why do we believe what hasn’t been said/ Why do we keep getting caught up in this quicksand/ Why do we call this lie our life]

And this pretty much explains most of the song. Bekhudi is a lament over existing in a world where much is wrong. It questions the meaning of such an existence. More importantly, it questions our seeming indifference to these wrongs. In that, Bekhudi is similar to previous iconic rock releases such as Shayad by Call The Band or Jumbo Jutt by Jumbo Jutt (featured in the first season of Uth Records). It might have been said before, but the message in Bekhudi still rings true today.

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 7th, 2021