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It's OK, It's All Good, Pentagram's new album, is well named, says Amit Gurbaxani.

Pentagram's new record should see the headbangers windmilling their way back home. Entitled It's OK, It's All Good, it finds the quartet (vocalist Vishal Dadlani, guitarist Randolph Correia, drummer Shiraz Bhattacharya and bassist Makarand "Papal" Mane) achieving a middle ground between their electronica excursions and their hard rock roots.

It's been five years since Pentagram shocked Indi-rock listeners with their electronica-influenced sophomore album Up. The release was more Prodigy than the Police-meets-Pantera sound fans were used to hearing in their live shows and on their debut, We Are Not Listening (1996). The band's decision to make electronic samples an integral part of their set did not go down too well with a section of their audience. The one-time fans felt the "new" Pentagram was more suited to a nightclub than to a rock concert.

It's OK, It's All Good, however, has the mark of a band striking the right balance between self-indulgence and self-assurance, between experimentation and accessibility, and most significantly, emerging with a sound that is greater than the sum of its influences. Comprising 16 snappy rock tunes that wrap electronic embellishments around irresistible hooks, it has the power to rouse both tranceheads and metalheads into an adrenaline-fuelled frenzy.

Correia, who produced all the album's tracks, said that Good's listener-friendliness is not the result of a concerted effort but the outcome of the individual members' evolution as musicians. "The last album, in fact, was more conscious about breaking away from the typical heavy metal or classic rock vibe," he said. "This time, it kind of just fell into [a] place where we automatically wanted to reach out to more people that we kind of maybe alienated."

When they got down to recording Up, Pentagram was at the forefront of Mumbai's rock scene as one of the handful of bands that managed to elicit an equal amount of crowd enthusiasm for its originals as it did for its covers. As a band, however, they weren't just bored of playing the same tracks for almost a decade; they felt they were being idolised for the wrong reasons. "People in bands would feel that 'If Pentagram does Pantera, we should all do Pantera'," said Correia. "We used that to make something radical, a statement that inspires people to think their own way."

Up won praise for being a bold and brave record that defied the conventions of the typical Indian rock album but soon after its release, the band started doing fewer gigs and the members found themselves venturing into diverse creative territories. Correia delved deeper into the world of electronica with his dance music project funcinternational; Dadlani found success as a Hindi film music director with Shekhar Ravjiani; Bhattacharya started directing music videos. In 2003, guitarist Clyde D'Souza left the band. However, Pentagram's most difficult hour by far came after the Mosh Mania concert in July 2005.

When someone from the audience – a portion of which had been expressing disapproval at the band's presence by hurling abuse and bottles at them – threw a wooden plank on to the stage, Dadlani reacted by swinging his mic stand into the crowd, which ended up injuring long-time Pentagram fan Yash Ashar. Though he has publicly apologised for the incident twice, the episode continues to haunt him. He wrote "Rude", a track on the new album, about how his bluntness is often mistaken for brusqueness. "Shekhar and I are on Filmfare's music power list where it says 'Their weakness is their temper tantrums'," said Dadlani. "We don't have temper tantrums. We just expect to get paid on time."

"Rude" is the exception; the rest of the album finds the band in the kind of congenial, celebratory mood heard on tracks like "This Is For My People". Said Dadlani, "For a long time, we thought we might call it that. But 'It's OK, It's All Good' makes a great T-shirt." However, it's still not all OK or all good with the plank-thrower, he said. "Everybody who was there knows that we were provoked to a point where it became personal. You do not have the right to hurt anybody within this band. I will not stand for it. It's been 13 years. Surely that means something to somebody."

Dadlani and Correia said the reason why Pentagram has stayed together for so long is because the members give each other their space. "The real secret is that we don't hang out too much," said Dadlani. "You find bands where the guys are in each other's faces all the time and they end up disliking each other. Whenever we play, it's just full on. [But] we don't live in each other's homes. It's not as intense as it is with other bands. We're very chilled out."

It's OK, It's All Good, Counter Culture, Rs 199, is out now.

Photography Ameet Mallapur