A candid chat with Circus Police

Circus Police is a well-known name to music lovers in the country, with songs such as 'Mohini Romoni' and 'Ratrir Prohori' making a mark in the rock music scene. The band, however, had a stop-and-start career, trifling any momentum that they could gather in between their promising hits. Consisting of Zulyad Islam Qazi, Efaz Rahman Khan, Tanjib Chowdhury and Zaki Adnan, the band is now looking forward to a new start off the back of their fresh slate of releases. The Daily Star talks to the young musicians on their recent releases, and plans for the future.

Even though Circus Police is beloved among band music lovers, you have not been the most consistent when it comes to releases. Do you plan to be more regular in the scene now?

It has been 11 years since we started, and some bands in Bangladesh are able to release two to three albums within this time frame. We salute the artistes that are able to that. However, we all had a set of priorities, mostly with jobs and family commitments. This has been one of the biggest reasons holding us back. Amidst the pandemic, we had time to work on our music from our homes and was able to release 2 new singles. Right now, we are working on another song, which we intend to release soon. Hopefully, we will be more regular from now on.

You have been very active on YouTube this year. Tell us about your latest releases.

We have always wanted to make music videos for our songs, but never really found the time to actually follow up with it. Since time was on our side this year, we decided to make use of whatever resources we had at our disposal to make two videos for our two new songs.

The first release this year was "Bharshammo". The motivation of the song was from the perspective of a very pious man, who had his faith betrayed and starts to question God. It is a reflection of all what humanity did wrong. The song is about betrayal, agony and the disruption of equilibrium.

The second release was "The Unholy Tales of Adam & Lilith". We took inspiration for this song from an old Jewish myth. Lilith is depicted as Adam's first wife. The song is a narrative of the relationship that Lilith had with Adam before she left him for archangel Samel. Through the song, we hoped to pay tribute to the sounds of legendary rock bands of the 60s and 70s.

How are you keeping in touch with your fans?

We usually only use our social media platforms. We are grateful to the people showing their love and support to us through these platforms. Communicating with fans would have definitely been easier had we been more active on live platforms.

What are you busy with at the moment? Can we expect an album soon?

We have promised a lot of things for the last 10 years or so, and have not been able to follow up with it. People's lives are very unpredictable, especially if you consider the current situation. However, we have made a promise to ourselves to keep to it and make things happen this year. We are sticking to it as much as possible and we hope this would lead to at least an EP, if not an album. We have a bunch of songs on the pipeline and we are currently keeping ourselves busy with those. If there are no barriers or such, we could possible get them done within the end of the year. However, that too seems pretty ambitious at the moment. Let's keep our fingers crossed for the future!