Mumbai-based rock artist Rohit Kulkarni. Photo: Even Odd Productions
Rock artist Rohit Kulkarni has spent years fronting one of the country’s best tribute acts to Pink Floyd – The Think Floydian (previously known as Think Floyd) – so it’s no surprise to hear the progressive rock edge of acts like Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson heard in his new song “Running Away.”
The new melancholic, epiphany-driven single follows his first single of 2025, the similarly heavy and sprawling song “Time Always Flies” from February. “Porcupine Tree/Steven Wilson have been a huge influence on me. Love that music to bits,” Kulkarni says. “Running Away,” for its part, was written on a piano at a friend’s house in Mumbai in 2019. “It came about as a melancholic idea making me want to write about our current state of the world,” he says.
There’s a devastating kind of realization that Kulkarni builds up to in the song. While you might hear obvious prog influences, the artist says he didn’t approach it that way as a songwriter, instead wanting it to be “far more personal.” He adds, “I wanted to make it sound contemporary but with Rock being as a part of its DNA.”
The single is Kulkarni’s second release this year and he says he has about eight songs in total slated to release throughout 2025, with the next one coming up in April. “I also have some original Hindi tunes that I am working on. I plan to put them out this year too,” he adds.
Outside of this, Kulkarni also has The Think Floydian gigs, plus session work with mainstream and Bollywood artists Armaan Malik and Akhil Sachdeva. In 2023, a few of his Beatles covers, including “Please Please Me” with bassist and vocalist Tanisha Bhatnagar, went viral on Instagram. Kulkarni says, “For me, all these different acts have their own value in my life. With my cover acts, it’s my way of living with the music that has inspired me to do what I do in life. Without The Beatles and Pink Floyd, I wouldn’t be anything. When I do the tribute acts, it’s our way of saying thank you to these bands for impacting our lives so deeply. When it comes to originals, it’s something that is very personal. It’s true artistic freedom that I use to express my inner voice. Nothing dramatic has changed in my mind with time. Doing both these in parallel is super exciting for me!”
Listen to Rohit Kulkarni’s “Running Away” below.
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