Shot by Aryan Motiwala
After their higher studies in 2019, musicians Pritish Gandhi and Shaival Davda were on a Goa trip when a hotel receptionist pointed them towards a cliff behind an old fort, where they could watch the sunset. When Shaival repeated the name for Pritish to note down, they looked at each other and they just knew. By 2022, Sunset on the Cliff had officially begun as a Mumbai-based indie singer-songwriter duo. Since then, their guitar-led alternative rock music has opened up to synths and electronic textures while keeping its melodic, nostalgic heart intact. With their first-ever EP about to release, the duo talk about their journey.
Stumbling into Music
Pritish grew up with Pink Floyd, Lionel Richie and George Benson playing around the house, eventually picking up the guitar and realizing that he was more interested in using it to translate the ideas in his head than in just playing it. Shaival, meanwhile, first tried singing at 12, picked up an electric guitar partly in an attempt to fix his ‘tone deafness’, and by 14, decided that music was what he wanted to do. Two years later, a laptop, an audio interface and a free DAW took his attention from playing songs to making them. When the two met in 11th grade, their shared love for guitar quickly became a friendship and then a creative partnership. By the time they found their name in Goa, they had already begun figuring out what they could make together.
Making Art
Sunset on the Cliff is built on the space between what Shaival can articulate in words and what Pritish can articulate through sound. Sometimes Shaival starts writing lyrics over a guitar, with Pritish later finding the chords and textures to give them shape; sometimes a chord, a synth or a snare becomes the starting point for an entire song. The band also draws their references from infamous indie sounds like The 1975, Tame Impala and some modern classical sounds like Hans Zimmer and Brian Eno. Shaival also draws from films, books and current affairs.
Over time, preferring artists who treat music as an art form has pushed them to experiment with sounds and how they approach releasing music. Instead of releasing just one version of their single One of Them, they released a voice memo, a live version and more alternate versions. ‘We just loved the composition in itself so much that we were playing it on just the guitar and with stripped-down instrumentation and it felt really good. So we decided that with the whole electronically produced main track we should also release these versions. It just felt right because at every different stage of its creation, the track sounded different even though the composition was the same underneath.’
Being Heard
For all the confidence Sunset on the Cliff have in their music, putting it out into the world has come with its own uncertainty. ‘Does anybody even care about what we have to say? Would we be heard?’ Live performance has offered them one answer. With violinist Krishnaraj adding dimension to their songs and sound engineer Sangeeth Peter handling everything from their records to live backing tracks, their music takes on a fuller life beyond the studio. For the duo, collaborations are part of what makes Sunset on the Cliff work.
Now, with their first formal EP on the way, Sunset on the Cliff are thinking about music videos, new visual material and a physical CD. Alongside are plans to keep experimenting and to keep making people care, one song, one listener and one performance at a time. ‘We want to keep growing as artists and explore ourselves in ways we have never thought of. We want to keep experimenting, keep finding new ways of making art, keep elevating the scale of what we do next and make Sunset on the Cliff an experience that spans multiple art forms. What I hope does not change is our commitment to our art and each other.’
This is an article from the September EZ. For more such stories, read the EZ here.
Words Nidhi Soni
Date 24.9.2026