There’s something about the way a conch shell sounds. Not just the volume, though that carries far; it’s the resonance underneath, the way the note seems to arrive from somewhere older than the person holding it. For Shanka Tribe — the Kerala–based tribal fusion music collective formed by Atul P M (Munna), Joel Jackson P, Aswin Lal, Libin Noby, and Nithin M Menon — this is how every performance begins. The shankh, ‘conch’ in Sanskrit, marks the threshold between what was and what’s about to happen. Ritual, ceremony, and signature converge in a single breath. The sound announces itself.
Their newest release, UMOJA, which premiered on October 17, 2025, carries that same sense of arrival. The 20–minute extended play takes its title from the Swahili word for unity. The band describes their sound as ‘tribal trance’ or ‘organic trance’ when asked for a label. But labels tend to flatten what Shanka Tribe is doing — placing an African djembe in conversation with an Australian didgeridoo, letting a Middle Eastern oud respond to an Indian morchang, watching a Chinese pipa find its place among them all. What emerges is negotiation: instruments speaking across geographies, each carrying its own history.
Shanka Tribe started from college cultural competitions, the usual circuit of festivals and smaller gigs. But somewhere in the wilderness of Wayanad, the sound shifted. They began picking up instruments that felt unfamiliar, that demanded more than technique, and asked for context. The didgeridoo which holds thousands of years of Aboriginal Australian knowledge. The oud which carries melodies that predate modern borders. And the unassuming morchang, played across India for generations with a metallic twang capable of great intricacy. Each instrument is an archive and Shanka Tribe’s work is about opening those archives and asking what they have to say now.
UMOJA — filmed with loose storyboards that allowed choreography, camera flow, and set energy to shape the final piece
UMOJA unfolds across three tracks, each exploring a different expression of connection. Ithemba, which translates to ‘hope’ in Zulu, is meant to hold light when the world feels impossible — built on repetition until the repetition itself becomes comforting. Mhaso is all rhythm, the kind that bypasses thought entirely and lodges somewhere in the body. And then there’s Karmi, the band’s first Malayalam track, featuring vocalist Neha Nair. The song asks you to remember scale and that we’re all only fragments in something much larger, connected by the briefest moment of shared existence.
By necessity and by design, Shanka Tribe’s practice is collaborative. The collaboration with Rex Vijayan and Neha Nair brought on a different texture to UMOJA. Rex, a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, has been with the band since their debut track When Nature Calls in 2021 — part mentor, part collaborator, always encouraging. For their track Karmi, they wanted something that felt earthy, intimate, and yet rooted in Kerala — Neha’s voice carried that depth naturally. Here, music is a balancing act, local and global at once, and it works because the intention has always been clear from the very beginning.
The 20–minute video that accompanies UMOJA is as much a part of the project as the music itself. As intended, it is an immersive, meditative experience that transcends storytelling and becomes pure emotion. The video focuses on what happens within the viewer, the internal shift that occurs when you stop watching and start feeling.
1: Aswin Lal (tightlows) video editor and musician, capturing the band’s visual and auditory identity; 2: Joel Jackson P, a founding member whose musicality anchors Shanka Tribe’s sonic explorations
What Shanka Tribe is producing sits within a larger conversation happening across the independent soundscape in India right now. Artists are engaging with traditional knowledge as a living, evolving source to build from. The shankh that opens their performances is both ritual and choice — a deliberate decision to mark their work as connected to something older and ceremonial while simultaneously making space for instruments and influences from other traditions. The result is music that refuses easy categorisation, and the band waits to see what emerges from that meeting.
In a world that feels increasingly fragmented — divided by language, culture, geography, and politics — UMOJA arrives as an offering. When the shankh sounds at the beginning of a Shanka Tribe performance, it’s doing what conch shells have always done: calling people together, marking sacred time, announcing that something worth paying attention to is about to happen. The instruments Shanka Tribe has chosen carry centuries within them. The rhythms they play connect to ancestral memory. But the band is manifesting something much larger with that inheritance. And when the sound of the conch fades, what remains is the invitation: to listen, move, and remember. UMOJA, both as title and practice, is built on that recognition. Unity is the work. The music is how they do it.
UMOJA, now streaming on YouTube, Apple Music, and Spotify.
Featured Image by Jayesh Mohan for Shanka Tribe
