My Story

I grew up in the “Underground” era of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. I strongly believe that was a very strong time in the music scene of Bangladesh. The first album that I got my hands on as a physical release from my brother, was Black’s “Utshober Por”. It was beautiful, because it had a huge poster that emerged with you opened the booklet. It also had a back inlay, which  I feel are oddly nostalgic and not many albums came with it. Later on, my brother got his copy of Artcell’s “Oniket Prantor” and needless to say, it was also hauntingly beautiful and has one of the best booklets ever released in the Bangladeshi Band Music scene.

It wasn’t until 2012, that I fully started collecting physical releases. I remember I was fed up because I couldn’t find album art to tag my files with. Given the scenario in Bangladesh, it was normal for us to grow up sharing MP3s around, but this sense of piracy really affected the music industry. Albeit a bit too late to this realisation, I felt it was never too late to start something good. And I started purchasing albums: old, new and rare.

I decided it was time for someone to take initiative to scan and archive these artworks so it can benefit everyone, especially because these physical copies are getting increasingly rarer as days go by. Thus, Bangla CD Covers was born.

This blog is a big investment of time and effort for me. I do not support piracy so I never uploaded a single music track on it. But archiving the artworks helped me to connect the music even more, and help out many bands and publications to use them to make posts and articles.

I do not put any watermark on the images, and because of that I’m proud to say my blog is now one of the largest archives of artworks in the internet. I hope this helps the band music loving generation and future generations if they ever want to dive into the pinnacle of Bangladeshi Band Music era.

One of my proudest moments for Bangla CD Covers - sharing my passion with Isha Khan Duray

In February 2019, I was recognised and interviewed as a collector on the leading Bangladeshi music label company, G-Series' "newsg24", sharing my story with the father of Bangladeshi Underground Band music scene, Isha Khan Duray.

Through this blog and its complementary Facebook page, I have been able to reach out to the very same artists I grew up listening to and whose work I have been archiving over the last decade. Some notable mentions are: Shakib Chowdhury (Cryptic Fate), Arafat Kazi (The Watson Brothers, The Attempted Band), Saef Al Nazi Cezanne (Artcell), Elita Karim (Raaga), Saif Q (GrooveTrap) etc. I consider myself incredibly lucky and honoured to have made it this far and I am grateful to each and every reader, follower and listener of Bangladeshi band music, without whom I would not be here.

Shohail Ibne Mahbub