Weston Estate

Named after the neighbourhood

Weston Estate took shape in 2017 among five teenagers from Cary, North Carolina: vocalists Manas Panchavati and Tanmay Joshi, guitarist and songwriter Srikar Nanduri, producer Abhi Manhass and Marco Gomez. The name belongs to the Cary neighbourhood they came out of. Several of them had known each other since they were ten or eleven, and the families were close enough that the group worked as an extension of them. All are diaspora Indian or first-generation immigrant children; Panchavati and Joshi had sung in chorus from the age of four, and Nanduri played violin before switching to guitar.

The first song happened by accident. Joshi and the others were experimenting with FL Studio over an Indian dance hall beat and finished a track in a day. Nanduri's account of that session — immediate certainty that it was good — doubles as a description of how little else they had to work with. A Google Hangouts call afterwards made the band official.

The early uploads went nowhere, by the band's own admission because nobody was paying much attention to how they were released. A charity ball at a local high school in December 2018 was the turn, and "Cotton Candy" in May 2019 was the breakthrough: Spotify's editorial playlists picked it up and it passed 1.4 million streams. By 2020 the members were spread across UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, Duke and UNC-Charlotte, writing in bedrooms, attics and basements between semesters.

Nine years of soft records

The catalogue before the album is EPs and singles. Maggie Valley produced "Pears", which has passed 40 million streams and reached the top 15 of Spotify's US Viral chart. The SUPERBLOOM EP yielded "Thinking Out Loud", "Camouflage" and "I Saw Something", and the band marked that run with a self-curated SUPERBLOOM Festival in Brooklyn that sold out. Across everything the count now stands above 270 million streams worldwide, against three sold-out headline tours.

The sound through that stretch was indie R&B with a pop edge, and the reference points the band handed interviewers in 2020 were Frank Ocean and Clairo. They called it anti-pop. The division of labour was fixed: Manhass built beats, Panchavati and Joshi sang, Nanduri played.

Support work and festival bookings filled in the rest. They opened for keshi, and played Summerfest, Something in the Water, Wonderfront and Firefly. The Summerfest booking in Milwaukee on 20 June 2026 was two sets in a single day, at the Briggs & Stratton Big Backyard and the American Family Insurance House. A show at Colours Hoxton on 17 August 2025 put them in front of a London room.

Open Season

Open Season arrived on 25 September 2026 through Arista Records: thirteen tracks, roughly 38 minutes. It is a rock record on purpose. The band named The Strokes, Coldplay, Pink Floyd, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fontaines D.C. as the pull, and the arrangements carry much more live instrumentation and distortion than anything that came before. Their line around the announcement single, "Is This the End?", was that they wanted the project to feel more raw and real than their earlier work while keeping the old flavour.

It was made away from home. Through 2025 and into 2026 the band took week-long recording retreats roughly once a month — Asheville in North Carolina, Blakeslee in Pennsylvania, Shenandoah — tracking hard for a week, then spending the following month cutting the material down before the next trip. The old roles collapsed in the process. Nanduri described it as a free-for-all in which every member was handling production, instruments and vocals. One member left during the making of the record, something the band has since discussed in terms of grief rather than logistics. The lead single "Stain", "Moth to a Flame", "Scissorman" and the focus track "Cabin in the Woods" — written out of American Psycho and social alienation — carry most of the album's weight.

The response has been warm rather than unanimous. Off the Record Press, reviewing on release day, singled out "Stain" for opening in deliberate mess before swelling into an instrumental climax, praised the electric and acoustic layering on "Is This the End?", and heard the title track as a scrappy college band playing loud through fuzz. The same review treated "Scissorman" — dense production, a vocal that slides between talking, shouting and rapping — as the record's furthest reach and not its strongest. Aggregated user scores on Album of the Year sit around 70, split between listeners who want the new direction pushed harder and those who preferred the earlier, quieter material.

Where they stand in November 2026

The band is now based in New York, and much of the album rollout was an attempt to buy their way into that city's scene by doing something for it. On 25 September 2026, release day, they staged Open Season Battle of the Bands at Market Hotel in Brooklyn: five local acts, fifteen minutes each, with the audience voting on which of them would open a Weston Estate show. Book Spirit, The breaks inc., Meyru and Mary Shelley were among the competitors, and the winner takes the opening slot at Racket in New York on 20 November. Fan-made artwork was folded into the campaign alongside it.

The ambition they state is unsubtle and specific: to become a household name making music that outlasts them, and in particular to be a visible example for immigrant kids weighing up a creative career against the one their parents had in mind. The practical version of that, in interviews, is a narrower point about craft — that holding an audience is a separate skill from making records, and not everyone has it.

The rooms

Open Season Live is short and dense rather than broad: two nights in each of five cities. Outset in Chicago on 30 and 31 October, The Mod Club in Toronto on 4 and 5 November, The Independent in San Francisco on 9 and 10 November, the Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood on 16 and 17 November, and Racket in New York on 19 and 20 November. These are several-hundred-capacity rooms, a deliberate step down in scale from the festival stages of the summer, and doubling up each city rather than adding markets keeps the band in one place long enough to play to the same scene twice.

The shape of the set comes from the Superbloom headline tour, which is the most recent documented run. Those shows were tight: thirteen songs in sixty to seventy minutes, with The Ritz in Raleigh on 29 November 2024 running from 9.30pm to 10.40pm and Royale in Boston on 20 November 2024 going on at 9.45pm and off at 10.45pm. "I Saw Something" and "Camouflage" opened, "Pears" closed the main set, and the encore was usually "Stoked", occasionally with a cover of Marco Luka's "Big Talk". The Open Season material changes the weighting more than the length — the band's own framing is that the loud, distorted songs were built with a room in mind, which the bedroom-recorded catalogue was not.