Jangly and glamorous, Bottled Up’s freaked-up art pop is a smoothie of frontman Nikhil Rao’s key obsessions: Suburban Lawns, italo disco, Alan Vega, Television (the band), television (the appliance), Andy Warhol, the entire decade of the ‘80s, Prince’s particular shade of plum purple, his old Tascam 8-track, Factory Records. 
 
Indian-American by way of Oakland and LA, Rao’s the dude-who’s-seen-it-all meets dude-about-town. A sound designer and audio engineer by trade - professionally schooled in the art of film and video game scoring- Rao’s a man informed first by the sort of his journeying one’s got to do when faced with the darknesses of addiction and a twisty adolescence in and out of religious cults. For all of its gleaming guitars and glossy euro-flavored synthwork, Bottled Up’s filled with the mental residue one’s gets after asking the void to fuck off.
 
Co-led with Colin Kelly - a disciple of D.C.’s avant-analog scene - joined by Michael Mastrangelo and Beth Cannon on dueling guitars, and supplanted by Rao’s wunderkid brother, Rohit, on acid-jazz-does-punk drums, Bottled Up conjures the sort of psycho-potpurri-spirit that’s only given to the sort of band that’s able to conjure a vision of the things they love, the mountains they’ve overcome, and mutate it all into something you can dance to. 

Artwork for Crystal LP by Daya Ramesh
Artwork for BU2 by Allison Demoss

Verilities is following