The conference call that we have with Sasha Bowers Cohen, a musician from Spain, and Indian independent artiste Kabir Bhattacharya about their new collaborative EP lasts around 15 minutes. We discuss how they first met, what their inspirations are, and what direction they want to take for Red Summer, the band they have started together. The conversation is interesting, but it’s only when Cohen answers the final question — ‘What’s your age?’ — that we do a double take. “I’m 17,” they (Cohen’s preferred pronoun) reply.

We’d already known that Bhattacharya is 18 years old, having written about his prodigious talent last year. But we had assumed while talking to the two of them that the Mumbai teenager had collaborated with an overseas musician, who’s many years older. That assumption didn’t have as much to do with the maturity of their answers, or even the self-assured tone of their voice. Instead, it had a lot more to do with the proficiency of the music in The Sleep, Red Summer’s debut EP, which has shades of the groove metal and grunge sounds that emerged in the 1990s. If this is what the duo has achieved while still in their teens, the world is their oyster.