What do you get when a band raised on Filipino horror stories, folklore, emo-era song titles, and a love for musical experimentation takes over one of Manila’s most historic theaters?
For fitterkarma (stylized in all lowercase), the answer comes on September 19 at The Metropolitan Theatre.
The four-piece alternative band, composed of Joao de Leon, Sophia Miranda, Sanders Bayas, and Mikee ‘Lory’ Mendoza, will stage its first major solo concert, ‘kung tayo’y nasa isang horror na pelikula, tiyak ako ang una mong papatayin,’ where it will perform its debut full-length album in its entirety.
The show will also feature expanded stage design, concert-only arrangements, and a live collaboration with the Manila String Machine.
For fitterkarma, it is a chance to present the album as it was meant to be heard: not as a collection of singles, but as one long, evolving experience.
Where the songs become a world
For Joao, there is a certain magic to listening to an album from beginning to end.
‘I personally find the magic in listening to an album as a whole. It’s like a movie-it has a beginning, a climactic part, and an ending,’ he said during a recent roundtable with BusinessMirror’s SoundStrip and other media organizations.
That was the mindset fitterkarma brought into making its debut full-length record. Rather than focusing on which songs could become hits, the band paid attention to how each track would sound and feel as part of the whole.
‘Perhaps we focused less on the storyline and more on the sonic feelings of each track,’ Lory said. ‘Usually, albums now are structured around songs that could potentially become hits. But that wasn’t our focus. We were more concerned with the overall progression of how the album would sound and feel.’
The band said the album gave them more time and space to explore a wider range of sounds than they could within individual singles.
That wider musical palette will be heard live at the Metropolitan Theatre, with Manila String Machine joining the band onstage for the first time.
The strings were already part of the album’s recordings, but having them performed live changes how fitterkarma imagines the songs in concert.
‘Having them live gives the songs more life when we perform them,’ Joao said. ‘That’s the power of an orchestra. It’s so dynamic, so expressive.’
The horror at the heart of fitterkarma’s identity did not begin with the concert.
For Joao, it goes back to growing up with stories, movies, and television programs that scared him as a child. Filipino horror and folklore, in particular, became a recurring influence on his writing.
‘Most of them are somewhat inspired by horror and folklore drawn from Filipino culture. I believe horror and folklore are rich parts of our culture,’ he said.
Growing up, Joao said he heard plenty of stories from relatives and watched programs and documentaries known for their horror themes. His interest in horror films also started early.
Those influences eventually found their way into fitterkarma’s music and visual identity.
The concert title itself reflects that fascination while also paying homage to a particular era of alternative music.
Joao said its long, dramatic construction was inspired by the elaborate song and album titles associated with mid-2000s bands such as Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco, and Mayday Parade.
But the band does not want its listeners to approach its songs with a single prescribed interpretation.
‘I’m hoping the experience will be special for them. We also made it with room for listeners to have their own interpretations,’ Joao said.
He does not want to tell listeners exactly what a song means and leave no room for them to find their own meaning, he added.
A room for the unexpected
Fitterkarma has already experienced the kind of success that can create pressure for a young band.
‘Pag-ibig ay Kanibalismo II,’ which began as part of Joao’s thesis project, became one of the band’s breakthrough songs. Other songs from that batch also eventually became part of its catalog.
But the attention did not fundamentally change how the members approach songwriting.
‘It didn’t affect the flow or our creativity,’ Joao said. ‘Because if we were going to think about what people would think while making those two songs, we might as well not have worked on them at all if they weren’t true to who we are.’
Rather than recreate the formula behind their earlier successes, fitterkarma continues to explore.
The members said the new album contains different sounds, textures, genres and combinations, while older songs remain part of the record. Some of the material was written years apart, giving the album a way to trace the band’s growth.
The band is also holding on to something it considers essential to its music: human expression.
For Joao, that is something AI cannot replace.