The finals of TNL Onstage took place on the 3rd of September 2016 at the Viharamahadevi Open Air Theatre. After months of hard work, the winners were declared and awarded and this week, we caught up with them to talk about their big win! 

Today, the winner of the BAND CATEGORY - Kingdom Life. 

Tell us a bit about yourselves. 

We started out around 2014 doing music about what we love: spirituality. We didn’t want to be confined to a specific genre of music as we are a large collective of creative people and we have many musical influences. We wanted to do music which is spirit lead and is urban; hence we describe our music Urban Spiritual. 

How did you meet and what made you’ll decide to form a band? 

Well, Subodha used to be in a band called Brown Boogie Nation long time ago, and Thilanka had one day seen one of the old videos and started talking about music and they just started off from that one conversation in church and everyone came together from that point on. 

What’s the story behind your band name? 

Subodha was praying about starting this band and the name came to him in spirit. It resembles the Joyous life you have when you align your life to the kingdom of God. 

What’s the most difficult part about performing as a band? Who makes the major decisions? 

Well, Subodha is the person who guides us through regarding major decisions. When it comes to creating new music we rely on the Holy Spirit in prayer to give us new songs, lyrics, melodies. 

What was the toughest part about TNL Onstage? 

To be honest we took part simply for the gigs. Winning Onstage was not on our agenda. We wanted to get through to the finals so we will get to perform for a large audiences because as you know original music doesn’t still have a lot of gigs in Sri Lanka. So we used our best songs for the first round and the semi-finals. Then we realised we needed two new tracks for the finals. And that was a bit of a crunch to practise two new songs and be tight as a band. But with God’s grace it was fun. TNL Onstage was overwhelming in a good way. 

How does it feel to be the winner of TNL Onstage 2016? 

We are really happy because it is already opening up more gigs for us. TNL is brilliant in supporting us with recording songs and giving us radio air play. And also it shows that God rewards the pure in heart. 

What’s next? 

We want to record and put out as many tracks because we already have over 15 original tracks. We are also planning a concert to take place in October tentatively and also we are creating a second band within Kingdom Life so we can play multiple venues at the same time.