Outstation On Their Quest To Be The ‘Greatest Indian Boyband’

Outstation perform in Mumbai on February 14, 2026. L-R: Kurien Sebastian (Kerala, Delhi), Shayan Pattem (Hyderabad), Mashaal Shaikh (Goa), Hemang Singh (Prayagraj), Bhuvan Shetty (Udupi).

Atharva Sawant/Visva Records

As I walk into the Four Seasons in Bengaluru to meet Outstation, I am well aware it’s not an experience the average person will get to have.

I’m not talking about how the young quintet is hoping to be ‘the greatest Indian boyband,’ or that several members of their rapidly expanding fanbase would gladly exchange prized possessions to swap places with me. It’s more the strange feeling that comes with meeting an artist right at the start of what will be an incredible journey.

The odds seem stacked in their favor — Outstation was put together by multi-award winning Hollywood hitmaker Savan Kotecha, who, along with most of the bangers from the 2010s, also wrote One Direction’s debut hit ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, and the much beloved ‘One Thing’.

National auditions were announced on social media to form “India’s band for Indian youth”, as Savan told me last year, and twelve boys in their late teens and early twenties went into ‘boyband bootcamp’ in Goa. Mashaal Shaikh, Hemang Singh, Kurien Sebastian, Bhuvan Shetty and Shayan Pattem walked out as Outstation.

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Today, the boys are in town for one of their signature ‘Outstation Prom’ events, intimate ticketed events that have become their calling card since debuting in November with their first (and so far only) song, ‘Tum Se’.

They rise as soon as they see me, rather nervously saying hi and shuffling seats around. Surely they’ve done interviews in the past four months, I wonder out loud. “None of them were in the Four Seasons,” counters 19-year-old Kurien, and the ice is broken.

Rather too well, as I discover when Mashaal introduces himself as Hemang and Kurien introduces himself as Mashaal. Meanwhile, Shayan tries to peek at the questions in my notebook and remains fully unbothered when I catch him out.

The other members grumble good-naturedly about having to take care of the 17-year-old all the time. “One of our major problems,” Mashaal says solemnly, “is having to split for his diapers.”

This is what it looks like, seven months in: five boys in a hotel lounge who bicker intermittently, talking over each other with a familiarity born out of being in each other’s space 24/7. The bootcamp in Goa — a whole month of 6 AM starts, five-minute planks, busking challenges, dance intensives, group songwriting sessions and weekly showcases — was where five strangers from various corners of India became something.

Hemang recalls meeting Bhuvan, the oldest member at 23, for the first time at the Goa airport, fully stressed because the latter had never flown before.

Mashaal’s arrival was even more dramatic; “One dude entered,” Kurien recounts, “Long trench coat, all black, fully covered” on a hot sunny day, fully for the vibes.

All but one of them thought the audition was a scam when they first saw it on social media. Shayan found out who Savan Kotecha was, ran out of his room, and told his mother, “and even she was like ‘holy, what the hell.”

While Shayan’s parents were supportive from the get-go, the rest of them have different versions of the same story: parents who wanted stability, engineering degrees, safe choices, and sons who went anyway.

Bhuvan spent an entire year lying to his parents that he was job searching after his degree, until a social media post changed everything. Hemang was in his third year of college when he dropped out for bootcamp. His dad wasn’t thrilled, but he’s come quite a long way.

The boys holler as they remember their first visit to his hometown, Prayagraj, when a convoy of around 25 Scorpios and a full band baraat arrived to escort them to their press conference, where hilariously, none of the press knew who they were.

That is certainly not the case now. Outstation is backed by Kotecha’s Visva Records (which is on a hot-streak to the Oscars for the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack), Jugaad Motion Pictures, and Represent, a UMG-affiliated talent management company led by Aayushman Sinha. It seems they have tapped into a real gap in the market: music and concerts aimed at and for India’s teen adjacent audience. Boyband naysayers — as they have throughout history — might write off Outstation as saccharine at their own peril, shortsightedly dismissing the very real happiness (and loyalty-driven purchasing power) of the average teenager.

Outstation’s pop-ups started with a hundred-odd people, and have grown to 3000 at their Guwahati event. Their first gig outside the pop-ups was opening for Akon at his Mumbai concert (but they tell me the proms are more nerve-wracking).

The next evening, a week before Valentine’s Day, I’m at said prom.

The well-decorated room is packed despite the rather far-out location — a consequence of the alcohol-free nature of the event, which makes finding venues difficult — and I smile at the array of parents lining the back walls. A 15-year-old BTS (and now Outstation) fan’s father tells me she has set Tum Se as her morning alarm tone. Like many others in the room, she has her board exams (Indian equivalent of SATs) that week. “They seem like nice boys,” says dad.

Outstation, accompanied by their very young-looking band and Mashaal’s trench coat, comes on stage at 6 PM to massive screams that don’t let up through the entire show.

The crowd seems to be made almost entirely of devoted fans, considering most of them mouth along to the lyrics of unreleased songs with practiced ease. The boys’ talent is genuine but still relatively raw, which is almost a relief in contrast to the shiny, overly refined output of today’s pop machine.

They goof around, dance in an endearingly awkward fashion that speaks directly to the One Direction-shaped hole in my heart, sing covers of Hindi, Kannada and English songs, and crown a prom king and queen to ‘The Circle of Life’.

“We’ve released, like, one song,” Mashaal acknowledges during the encore, and the crowd cheers anyway, because they know every word of it. They sing it twice.

Bhuvan, before the acoustic set, gives a speech. He does this at every prom, about growing up with anxiety so bad his hands would shake, about his mother sending him to sing for strangers as a child because she believed in him before he did, about how far he has come. The flashlights go up and the crowd screams we’re proud of you.

The whole thing is very wholesome; the fans are fully dressed up, some with obliging dates, and the show is over by a very family-friendly 7:15 PM, leaving the fans to scramble for the merch station and the unreleased music booth outside.

I find myself smiling without realizing it. What I wouldn’t have given to be fifteen and fidaa over an age-appropriate boyband from my own country.

Back in the hotel the previous afternoon, the conversation has turned to fans.

They’re amazing, Hemang and Shayan say — the gifts, the creativity, the sheer inventiveness. There’s a wall at home, full of the custom Pokémon cards, notes, crocheted initials, plants, and gifts they’ve amassed in less than a year.

In Pune, someone brought Hemang a bouquet made entirely of photos of him, sourced from random Snapchat selfies. For his birthday, fans went to an orphanage and cut a cake in his name. “When I saw that video,” Hemang says, “I was genuinely about to cry.”

Some fans, they add, do take it a step further into invasion-of-privacy territory, like following their parents’ secret Instagram accounts, but they hasten to assure me that most of their fandom has been amazing, respectful and self-policing. The boys say they love it.

After the concert, I watch them signing merch in the booth as their team attempts to manage the crowd of incoming fans. Mashaal is standing on the table, Shayan is enjoying the selfie of it all, and Bhuvan’s smile is ever so slightly drained.

Out of nowhere, I am slammed by a wave of investment in their well-being. Suddenly, I want these boys to be great, but more than that, I want them to be okay.

I unpack this potentially parasocial moment with my friend later, but he’s not impressed. “Ah, it sounds terrible, living with fame,” he gripes. “No, you’re right,” I tell him. “Boybands have famously ended well for everyone involved.”

Generations of fans have seen it happen: the breakups, burnouts, mental health struggles. Fans of KATSEYE (whom Shayan also admires) are in the trenches as we speak, after the label announced member Manon Bannerman’s hiatus without specifying a return date.

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There is much pressure on the boys to live up to the ‘Greatest Indian Boyband’ moniker they’ve given themselves.

Outstation are not, it should be said, India’s only answer to the boyband drought; First5, put together by singer Aksh Baghla, debuted before them, albeit without the might of a big label and Savan Kotecha in their corner. Notable mention is also producer Mikey Cleary’s four-member girlband W.i.S.H, whose track ‘Bolo Bolo’ landed on Spotify India’s Viral chart.

In our interview, Kotecha, however, told me there are influential eyes on the Outstation boys, including those of the newly opened HYBE India, observing whether his experiment will pan out. If Outstation succeeds, Kotecha said, not only will it be groundbreaking for the music scene in India, but it will also help him he debut more artists from further parts of the country.

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Back in the Four Seasons, I ask them how they cope with the increasing stress of it all, the constant moving from place to place, the many many videos they take for social, the fact that this is only going to get more intense. “We just wing it,” says Shayan, and the group laughs their agreement.

They cycle through different coping mechanisms. Hemang’s daily riyaz (which, the others inform me, is audible through the entire floor), Kurien’s random 10K runs, Bhuvan’s poetry. “Every poem I wrote,” he says, “I feel like I didn’t write it, my feelings wrote it for me.”

The others start clapping. “That was a poem,” Kurien says.

Shayan orders food (sushi, if there’s money), and has developed an obsession with making omurice. We then go on a food-related tangent, discussing Chef Motokichi’s techniques and whether Shayan’s ghee-rice-sugar on jam toast is an abomination or surprisingly inventive, before Hemang gently brings us back.

Mashaal’s answer — that he’s fine now because nothing can compare with how depressed he was in his ‘2020-2024 arc’ — is the most serious he’s been for the entire hour. He prefers to be with his many instruments; the more time spent, the more his brain works.

I wonder out loud if they have therapists (their label head later tells me they have access to mental health support if they ever need it). “We have each other,” quips Kurien.

Mashaal slaps the table. “Let’s talk about omurice again.”

As we wrap up our interview after an hour of tangents and laughter, I ask Outstation one final question. What would each of them like to ask their future selves, the ones five years from now?

Shayan goes first. “Did we sell out the biggest stadium in the world?” Hemang is next: “Who are you? Did you figure it out?” Before all this, he says, he acts on instinct, doing whatever, following thoughts as they come. Now it’s different. He doesn’t know who he is yet, and he wants to know if he will.

Mashaal wants to know how many instruments he can play — any instruments, the more the better, á la Jacob Collier. Bhuvan — who was terrified on his first flight, who shakes when his mother sends him to sing for strangers, who gives the same speech at every prom because it’s true every time — asks: Was it worth it?

Kurien goes last, after thinking for a while. “I would ask, what makes you happy?” he says finally. “Are you happy?”

At the prom, the boys finally pile into an SUV and drive to another flight as several waiting fans wave goodbye. Some of them linger, one squealing repeatedly as she rewatches a video she took with the boys.

I have a feeling that Outstation is going to make it. With any luck, they will make it there, happy.