Lo! Peninsula are making shoegaze out of Manipur's hardest years

Shoegaze is a genre built on blur: guitars turned into weather, vocals half buried, feelings you hear before you can name them. For Lo! Peninsula, that blur has had something very specific to sit inside. The trio is from Imphal, and their newest song is about what more than three years of conflict in Manipur does to ordinary people.

Who they are

Lo! Peninsula are Nitin Shamurailatpam on guitars and vocals, Avinash Thokchom on bass and Jyotin Elangbam on drums. They describe themselves as a shoegaze, psych rock and dream pop band, and their name, as they told Seattle radio station KEXP back in 2018, came from a business card they found inside a guitar amp.

That KEXP connection is a big part of their story. The non-profit station picked up on the band around their 2018 debut EP, AKA Lo Peninsula, a self-released record they made DIY in an ordinary, non-soundproofed room with Sudip Kongbrailatpam, an aspiring engineer who built his own microphones. None of them had been inside a professional studio at that point. KEXP has kept championing them since, including picking their cover of "Super Glue" as a Song of the Day in May 2023.

Along the way came songs like "Chasing Tidal Waves", "Battleships" and "Kintsugi", plus slots at Magnetic Fields, Ziro Festival and NH7 Weekender, according to The Hindu.

The song

On 31 July 2026 the band released "Song For The Undead", their latest single. In their own words, it was written in response to living through the conflict in Manipur since May 2023, and it reflects on how empathy and hope wear away under prolonged violence and injustice.

It is a hometown production. Satish Elangbam recorded it, Sudip Kongbrailatpam (the same engineer from the first EP) mixed and mastered it, and the video was shot by Borlin Chanam and Somba Pukh at Warin Chingra. The Hindu reported that KEXP aired the song as a premiere, and that it led to an enquiry about a show in Seattle.

The cost of being a band from Manipur right now

Speaking to The Hindu ahead of their Bengaluru date, Nitin laid out what the last few years have looked like from Imphal. By his count, Manipur has seen at least 523 days of bandhs, shutdowns and economic blockades, with internet suspensions across more than half of that time, on top of regular power cuts.

Touring adds another layer. He told the paper that road travel out of the Imphal Valley is often unsafe, so flights are frequently the only real option, even when they are expensive. Add the pandemic years, personal commitments and what he described as a period of lull, and you can see why Lo! Peninsula have moved in starts and stops since that first EP. He also said the time away helped the band work out a different way to approach music, which is what brought them back.

Bengaluru, and what is next

Lo! Peninsula were booked to make their Bengaluru debut on 26 September 2026 at The Humming Tree in Indiranagar, for the tenth edition of the Oaf Big Gigs series, alongside Mumbai band Long Distances and local act Packers & Movers. Tickets were sold through Skillboxes.

After that, Nitin told The Hindu, the band has a few shows lined up in Manipur before the end of the year and is aiming to release an EP in early 2027. A US tour is the bigger dream, which he admitted looks hard given the money and logistics involved, but not impossible.

The Cosign

We are cosigning Lo! Peninsula because this is exactly the kind of band Indian indie needs to keep in its sightlines. They found an international ear years ago, from a DIY room in Imphal, and they have kept making music through conditions that would have ended most bands. "Song For The Undead" is out now. Give it a proper listen with headphones, and keep an eye out for that EP.