Sameer Gadhia, frontman for platinum selling rock band Young The Giant, is set to launch Point Of Origin, a spotlight feature highlighting hand-picked, culturally-diverse, musical discoveries in the alternative space, airing regularly on SiriusXM’s Alt Nation (ch.36), starting today.
Gadhia explains: “By its very definition, alternative music is supposed to challenge boundaries by providing new and unheard possibilities. Though the sonic landscape is diverse, the limelight has cast a vastly monochromatic field. I am living proof that this is not so, and my aim is to illuminate artists who express the truest definition of what alternative is and should be by identifying what connects us all to our shared love of music. Through this platform, I want to create opportunity for artists of color and help foster a divergent narrative for today and tomorrow’s alternative music scene.”
Hosted and curated by Gadhia, Point Of Originwill focus on one artist over a two-week period by granting heavy, on-air exposure to one song from the artist. This will also be accompanied by commentary from Gadhia on the hand-picked artist and song. The first artist to be featured is Pennsylvania-native and a Pigeons & Planes New Artist to Watch in 2020, binki, who describes his sound as “packed with equal parts riotous funk, cavalier rap, with a bratty-rock swagger.” After creating buzz across the blog circuit, touring with Benee and Still Woozy, binki’s “Sea Sick” will garner its first national radio airplay as the first featured song on Point of Origin. For more information, visit www.pointoforigin.world.
Gadhia had been called “one of the great contemporary rock voices” by The New York Times, he is the son of immigrants from Ahmadabad, India, who came to the U.S. in the 80’s shortly before he was born. Issues of culture and diversity have been something he’s ruminated on for most of his life, both consciously and subconsciously. The band’s 2016 album Home of the Strange deliberately honed in on the modern American immigrant story, a theme that was especially relevant to the quintet as they’re each from different ethnic backgrounds with most being immigrants themselves or first-generation Americans. Gadhia wrote about balancing the two very different worlds of his ethnicity and nationality in an editorial piece for Salon (read HERE), and also had an in-depth conversation with NPR’s Ailsa Chang on the topic for “Weekend Edition” (listen/see HERE).
Young the Giant is currently writing and recording music for their next album, much of which was chronicled in the band’s “Song A Day” project which sees band members sharing music clips with each other over Instagram, culminating with a completed song each Saturday. Fans can watch the process in their Instagram highlights HERE.
SiriusXM subscribers can listen to Alt Nation (ch. 36) and other channels on SiriusXM radios, and those with streaming access can listen online, on-the-go with the SiriusXM mobile app and at home on a wide variety of connected devices, including smart TVs, devices with Amazon Alexa or the Google Assistant, Apple TV, PlayStation, Roku, Sonos speakers and more. The SiriusXM app also offers additional features such as SiriusXM video, Personalized Stations Powered by Pandora that listeners can curate themselves, and an On Demand library with more than 10,000 hours of archived shows, exclusive music performances, interviews and audio documentaries. Go to www.SiriusXM.com/streaming to learn more.
