Most bands formed in high school almost always dissolve by the time the members reach college, but not Weston Estate. Featuring two NC State students, Weston Estate is a rising Triangle-based five-member indie band currently signed under a Sony record label, attracting big names like Pharrell Williams and thousands of TikTok followers. 

Abhishek Manhass, a fourth-year studying applied mathematics, is the band’s bass guitarist and producer. According to Manhass, the band was formed in 2017 when Manhass’ parents were on vacation in India.

“Long story short, one day my parents went to India and left me all alone at home and I asked our other singer, Tanmay to come over and we made our first song,” Manhass said. “There’s a lot of mischief involved — the first song we released will never be heard but it got a good reaction from our community, we put it on Soundcloud, and then after that, we released another song and started adding more members. All of them were close friends.”

Srikar Nanduri, a fourth-year studying biological sciences, is the band’s guitarist. Nanduri said the band’s name is attributed to a nearby neighborhood next to his band member’s house. 

“[It’s] called ‘Weston Estates,’” Nanduri said. “We used to go there all the time and hang out. We wanted it to sound regal, extravagant.”

From the band’s transition from middle school to high school, they began releasing music on popular streaming platforms like Spotify and performing in public. Their first concert was at Space Jam in 2018, Enloe High School’s annual charity concert, and it was there they claimed they realized there was potential for Weston Estate.

“At that point we knew that people had heard our music, we didn’t realize people were listening to it like that,” Nanduri said. “They would sing the words back.”

Another landmark experience for the band was their first addition to a Spotify Editorial playlist in 2019 with their single, “Cotton Candy.” They also made the cover of another playlist called “Chill Vibes.”

One experience Manhass values immensely is when the band discovered a model had shared Weston Estate’s music with Pharrell Williams, one of Manhass’s favorite producers, in a podcast. It was later discovered that Williams added their music to his podcast’s playlist.

Over this summer, the band released their single, “So Good,” which has now amassed 1,951,000 listens on Spotify, and Weston Estate now stands at over 939,000 monthly listeners. The band also filmed a music video for the single and recently performed at a Duke University function.

“When we got there, we realized that everyone was going to be sitting in lawn chairs and picnic blankets and stuff like that, and usually at our shows, it’s a lively kind of vibe,” Nanduri said. “People are always jumping up and down, dancing and freaking out. When we saw that, we were like ‘oh no, maybe this is not the vibe.’ But we talked to one of the guys that was there and he said to tell them to stand up. After a few songs, we were like ‘alright, everyone get up’ and the vibe changed completely.”

Being a band where all of its members are attending separate colleges apart from Manhass and Nanduri, Weston Estate faces a set of unique challenges.

“It’s definitely hard, a lot of people think you can go through life thinking that you can have one thing that you’re 100% dedicated to,” Nanduri said. “Right now, the things that are happening with Weston are really exciting and really cool and we want to take it as far as it can and keep it going. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really feel like work when we’re together, it’s more like we’re hanging out and making music for fun.”

Nanduri credits Weston Estate’s longevity to the band’s origins as childhood friends.

“Now that things are going well, it’s gone to the point where we don’t even have to try to keep the bond going,” Nanduri said. “I could honestly not talk to any of them for a month and then just come back and it would be like we talked yesterday. A lot of it is also because of just the nature of the band, we have to call each other a lot just to do work. But when we’re doing work calls, after we’ve finished talking about whatever we need to talk about, we end up staying on the phone for another 30 minutes, just talking about random stuff that’s going on in life.”

The next few months will be very important for the band with the release of their new single, “Drown,” and its music video on Sept. 9, along with their performance at Firefly Music Festival in Delaware at the end of September.

“The biggest thing coming up for us is Firefly,” Nanduri said. “That’s a huge festival where there’s a bunch of artists that we all look up to, they’re all going to be there and playing. This is the first music festival that any of us have been to and it’s one that we’re actually playing at.”

In anticipation of a busy few months, the members of Weston Estate have decided to take a gap semester in order to focus on their music and hone in on a sound and style, along with potentially writing their first album.

“We all want to graduate still obviously, we’re at the point where we’re all seniors, it makes sense for us to finish school but this semester especially is going to be important for us because of the festival,” Nanduri said. “After that, we’re going to move to LA for a month and a half and make music together and just hang out with people and make connections.”

Manhass said the visual aesthetic of the band is something they all value. Their time in Los Angeles will also be spent solidifying their image along with their musical style, as it’s currently difficult to pin the band down to a specific genre of music 

“We have three singers — it gives us a lot of leverage to do whatever we want,” Manhass said. “There’s no album out where we’ve developed a sound. We did an EP and I would call it ‘lo-fi indie pop.’ 

In terms of their upcoming single, “Drown,” Manhass said it encapsulates the feelings the band felt this summer and its style can be described as “space cowboy,” to which Nanduri laughed.

“It’s a combination of all of our feelings,” Nanduri said. “We all went through some very similar experiences throughout this summer, so figuring that out and dealing with that.” 

With Weston Estate’s exponential success and big plans for the rest of the year, it is clear the band is heading toward a bright future.