Catch this hip-hop bus

Tanmay Saxena, who is also known as Tienas

Born into a family of musicians, including his vocalist mother and instrumentalist uncles, it seems like it was only a matter of time that Tanmay Saxena, now known more popularly as Tienas, turned to music. And thank god for that. For today, he's made a mark for himself, as proven by his debut 13-track album titled O that he had released last week.

Ask him about his first memory of singing, and he admits that like all Indian households, he too had caught the Bollywood bug. "It got me into a lot of trouble. Also because I never had a stutter while singing, so my teachers thought I was a fraud," the Mumbai-based rapper/producer reveals.

But then he watched the Eminem-starring movie 8 Mile for the first time in 2012, and that inspired him to make his own music, besides making him fall in love with hip-hop. "Eminem was my first step into being a rapper and musician," says the rapper, whose music also has touches of Jim Morrison, John Lennon, and Kendrick Lamar. Such that even his stage name Tienas is a play on his initials T n' S, which mirrors his idol, Eminem's stage name which arise from his initials, M n' M.

The album, named, simply, O, is a result of the Mumbaikars dream of finding his own sound and enjoy the process. "The main idea was for me to be able to make music that I myself find catchy. For example, the song 10:18 doesn't really have a message. I liked the beat and then I just got the idea from the shepherd, the sheep, and the wolf. It was then very easy for me to draw a similarity with the industry. The artist is like a shepherd and music is the sheep, the shepherd must save its sheep from the wolf," he tells us.

And what of the name of the album? "When I was playing the half done album to my brother, who is also my bandmate RaySon47, he said it sounds like a soundtrack to life, that's when I thought of a circle. I later decided that instead of spelling it out, I would keep it as ‘O'. The idea behind it is that there is no definition to life, you can call it whatever you want. But someone else will look at it and experience it differently. It is what it is, it's O," he shares about the album, which also features rappers Prabh Deep, Sez On The Beat and Seedhe Maut.

Another thing that caught the attention of fans and first-timers was the preview of his album, complete with a bus ride to the venue where people on the bus got to listen to the album. Karan Yadav from the Azadi Records, who conceptualised the preview, shares, "I had ideas like this in the past when I used to freelance, but I didn't have the bandwidth to execute it. I was bored with mundane listening parties or gigs. I wanted to do something memorable and thought this was it and Tienas is a perfect artist for this. No one had done something like this in the past the execution because it's quite challenging."

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