Pinkshift, courtesy.

John’s Hopkins is known for fostering the careers of medical professionals, not post-punk rockers. At least until now. Pinkshift has entered the chat.

“In college, I really couldn’t find a group of people that were into the same type of music,” guitarist Paul Vallejo said. “There’s no music scene at our school. Well, there is, but it’s classically trained or jazz.”

Up until his senior year, Vallejo’s search for fellow musicians to jam with had come up short. Then he had a chance encounter with vocalist Ashrita Kumar. Vallejo studied chemical engineering (and now has a master’s degree). Kumar was studying neuroscience and has bachelor’s in that, as well as a master’s in molecular biology).

“My friends had a cappella groups, so if they needed somebody, I’d just do it for fun or volunteering,” Kumar said. “We were singing mash-ups of Disney songs like ‘Aladdin.'”

After seeing Kumar sing at a school event, Vallejo was sold.

“I was like, ‘I need this; I need this person,'” he said.

Pinkshift photographed at Aftershock Festival at Discovery Park in Sacramento on Oct. 5, 2023. Mike DeWald/STAFF.

And the offer couldn’t have come at a better time for both of them, as Kumar was going through a bout of depression and needed the creative work to snap out of it. The pair wrote songs together before forming the punk- and grunge-influenced Pinkshift. Their final needed ingredient was a drummer—whom they’d find through another chance meeting.

“Myron [Houngbedji] was playing ‘Helena’ by My Chem in our school’s practice room, and we just cold-knocked on the door and interrupted him,” Vallejo said. Their future drummer had never played with anyone else to that point. The three went on to practice together for months, going through all the growing pains of a band together.

“I was still learning how to play the damn instrument,” Houngbedji said. “One time Paul asked me to count us in. I didn’t know what that meant!”

Houngbedji was also studying neuroscience. All three are the children of immigrants—Kumar is Indian American, Vallejo is Peruvian American and Houngbedji’s family is from Benin in West Africa—and all were raised to work hard and overachieve. Studying medicine-related fields gave them an opportunity to be financially independent but also to support their families and start to build generational wealth.

Pinkshift began to take off and cultivate an audience outside the trio’s group of friends as they finished up school. Then the pandemic arrived. Kumar had just booked the band’s first tour after emailing venues for months, and that was now dead in the water. Now that the band has been able to actually tour, the transition from a 9-to-5 to being touring musicians was bumpy at first, Kumar said.

Kumar’s employer (they were working as a lab tech) didn’t let them work remote, and fired them while the band was on tour in Canada. Pinkshift eventually signed with Hopeless Records, which provided assistance releasing music and setting up shows, but the three remain involved in every aspect of the work, which Kumar said is due to the work ethic they picked up at John’s Hopkins. And Vallejo saw for the first time that music could be a realistic career rather than a side hobby.

The band released its debut EP (Saccharine) in 2021 and followed it up with a long-player, Love Me Forever, the next year. As it works on writing the follow-up to 2023 EP Suraksha, the three are trying something new by incorporating their spontaneous on-stage jams—which are part of their shows—into what might become songs. The in-show jams came about as a necessity as much as a creative decision, Kumar explained.

“When you’re playing so many shows and you’re playing the same songs over and over again, I feel like the jam is the time when we get to experiment,” they said. “Half the time, we don’t actually have the opportunity to practice, or even be in a practice space and figure out our songs.”

Pinkshift will get a chance to play some of that new material as it hits the festival circuit and also joins New Jersey rockers The Gaslight Anthem on the road this summer. The band also just dropped an EP of remixes from their debut LP, Love Me for the Summer.

Besides making and performing music, Pinkshift is active in social justice causes. The band has been using its platform to convey a message of inclusion in its push for racial diversity, gender inclusiveness—Kumar identifies as nonbinary—and support for the people of Palestine. Russian activists Pussy Riot hand-selected the trio as an opening act.

Knowing that they can affect the lives of 300 to 500 people at their shows had Kumar thinking about what kind of impact Pinkshift wants to make. The band has fundraised for trans issues, Baltimore Safe Haven, which advocates for queer people and trans communities in Maryland; the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and Pious Projects, which is also providing aid to Palestine.

“I wanted to go into healthcare because I cared about people. And I really wanna fix the world. I wanna make a difference,” Kumar said. “With Pinkshift having the platform that it does, it really gives us the opportunity to do that. Materially giving back is important to us because the whole basis of music is humanity. Where are we as musicians without our humanity?”

The band wants to help its audience know it has a voice, too—one show at a time.

“With some of the new music that we have coming on, that’s another thing that we want to emphasize: that everybody has a voice,” Vallejo said.

Follow writer Mike DeWald at Twitter.com/mike_dewald.