THIS year's National Day Parade (NDP) will have a distinctly rock vibe.

Local indie rock band Electrico will take centre stage to perform this year's theme song, which it penned.

It is the first time a local rock band has been picked and given the honour of singing for the nation. Solo local pop artists like Stephanie Sun and Kit Chan have usually been the choice.

The band's frontman David Tan said: 'It shows we have progressed...We are proud to be recognised as the people the NDP organisers would like to make the change with.'

Electrico has appeared before at the NDP, but those performances were before the main event. Mr Tan, 33, said it took him two weeks to compose the song What Do You See? The final version of the song was approved by the NDP organisers two weeks later.

'It's a song that goes out to four million people...We wanted it to be poetic as well as simple, so that aunties and uncles in the coffee shops can sing it as well,' he said.

The four-minute song started airing on television on Thursday night.

The performance on Aug 9 will also be the first time Electrico will perform without their keyboardist Amanda Ling, who left the band last month.

The band members said they hope to give goose pimples when they perform in front of 27,000 spectators and more than a million television viewers.

On Thursday, show committee chairman Colonel Desmond Tan revealed more about the two-hour production, titled One Show. It will trace the Singapore story from its start as a fishing village to its status as a metropolis today.

Please read the full story in Friday's edition of The Straits Times.

jermync@sph.com.sg