Level Five on Level Fifteen: The elevator is going exactly where it is supposed to

"Are you a journalist too?" I asked the fellows stuck with me in the elevator.

"No. We are Level Five," one of them replied.

When you interview a popular musician, the first question you ask is about their latest project. Or what they are up to these days. But not me, I am special. The first question I chose to ask Aiedid  Rashid, the vocalist of Level Five, the one I was there to interview, was whether he was a journalist himself.

I still did not get it when they told me they were Level Five in the elevator. I thought they were going to level five or something.

When I reached where we were supposed to meet, I sat down with the same fellows at a table. As the organisers introduced me to Level Five, only then did I realise I had mistaken the band was supposed to interview for the press. Aiedid was cool about it. We laughed, and I sarcastically introduced myself as a singer.

Level Five is everywhere these days — from the Instagram stories of your friends to cineplexes, the song Tumi resurfaces on your feed at least once a day. But I was not familiar with their faces. Chances are, you are not either. There is a reason for this.

"I want people to know my art," Aiedid said. "But as a performer, I want to stay low-key. I did not want a lot of people to know me." He is not sad when people do not find the music, and he is not chasing it when they do. He makes something because he wants to make it, puts it out, and lets it find whoever it finds.

That philosophy has carried them through fifteen years of making music on their own terms.  Level Five has built its following steadily — a devoted audience that found the band rather than the other way around. Utsab did not make them; it widened the door. The mass reach it brought was a new chapter, not the whole story. 

"There is a difference between a commercial song and an art product. We always prefer that the creative control stays on our side. We want our art to be ours. Unfiltered." …

Aiedid Rashid, Vocalist of Level Five

When director Tanim Noor called about Utsab, the band was divided. Several members were sceptical — a film placement felt like the first step towards losing something.  "They were worried it would get commercialised," Aiedid recalled. "I kept pushing back. I said, Tanim Noor is an exceptional director. He will do justice to it. Just trust him." 

He brought the band to Noor's office. The director read the script aloud. As he did, Aiedid said he could already see the visuals forming. "I could automatically visualise — oh my god, this is something close to what I had imagined." The rest of the band came around, though not without hesitation.

What none of them anticipated was the scale of usage. They had assumed the song would appear in one scene. Noor, in the edit, decided Tumi belonged to the whole film. It stayed.

"When I saw the cinema, and people were chanting the song in the hall — I felt that was the biggest achievement of my life," Aiedid said. 

Utsab pulled in a demographic that Level Five had not fully reached before. College and university students already know the song. The film introduced it to everyone else — older siblings, parents, uncles who had never found their way to an indie band's release page. A love that Aiedid had wanted to portray in the song found its scene in the film, and the film found its audience in a generation that carried the song back out with them. 

That success has not changed what the band will and will not do. The manager of the band said Level Five rarely takes on commercial projects, and when they do, the terms are specific: the brief belongs to the client, the music belongs to the band. Their creative control, Aiedid said, is not a stance against commerce so much as a condition of making honest work. "There is a difference between a commercial song and an art product. We always prefer that the creative control stays on our side." He paused. "We want our art to be ours. Unfiltered."

The fifteen-year mark has also pushed the band outward. Level Five recently shared a stage with Pakistani indie acts Bayan and Talpaata Shepai — they were the only Bangladeshi act on the bill. Aiedid has been listening to Talpaata Shepai for years. Standing alongside them meant something beyond the setlist.

"I do not want the international artists to hear a Bangladeshi band and say ki bajalo," he said. "I want them to say: Oh my god. Because we are basically representing our country."

The hope extends further. Aiedid pointed to Joy Joy Crook, a Bangladeshi rapper based in the UK, as an example of what is possible — a Bengali artist inserting herself into global circuits from a distance. He wants more of that, across every format. Bands, solo artists, pop acts — collaborating internationally, taking Bengali culture outward rather than waiting to be found. "That collaboration needs to grow," he said. "Not just for us. For everyone." 

Fifteen years in, the band's manager says surprises are still coming this year. From a band that has spent fifteen years making music on its own terms, that is probably the most they will ever give away.

The elevator, it turns out, was going exactly where they said it was.