A week ago, Delhi-based band Faridkot released its five-song EP, called Ibtida, and mounted it on record label T-Series. The EP, which the band describes as a bouquet of love songs, arrives after nearly a decade of the band’s last album Phir Se, which was released in 2014, just three years after its debut album Ek. In between, Faridkot belted out about 10 singles, including the Bollywood song Jeda Nasha.
Band members IP Singh and Rajarshi Sanyal look back at their 15-year career in the music industry as an evolution of sorts. On a Zoom call, IP explains, “This sound is where we are at currently, and we are working on some more music and that will be probably different from this because at any point and time our music reflects where we are at and there’s no certain kind of style that we like to go for.”
The band actively started working on the EP some two months ago, shares Rajarshi, even though the compositions, he says, have been developing overtime. “The music has been constructed in the past few months. Sonically, we wanted to keep the songs in the present, just to make the EP relevant to where we are musically right now. In fact, the word ibtida means new beginnings and this is our first EP,” he says.
The band intended to explore new sounds, which led its members to experiment with different instruments in Ibtida. “In one of the songs, a Punjabi song, we have used sitar as a solo instrument; I don’t remember having heard sitar in a Punjabi song. We have also collaborated with musicians Jubin Nautiyal (in the song Main Na Jaanu Kyun) and Raghav Chaitanya (for the track Chhad Ke Na Jaa), who brought their own colours to the EP,” says IP. Rajarshi adds that the compositions in the EP also have nuanced sounds, such as the sound of scratching, writing on a piece of paper.
Lyrically, while compiling the EP, IP and Rajarshi were considerate of the chronology and silence between the tracks. “We are lucky that all the five tracks flow from one to the other. There’s an invisible thread joining them. The songs in the middle have an emotional curve that reaches a crescendo. So, when you start with the first song, the emotional curve begins, it peaks in between, and then we bring it back, completing the whole circle with the last track,” says IP. He shares that Rajarshi would often hear the songs repeatedly to see the order in which they were to be placed in the album. “One had to figure out the aftertaste of the song to see if it is setting the palate for the upcoming song,” he adds.
The band continues to maintain its self-defined genre “confused pop”, refusing to be confined to labels. IP’s stance is clear: “We always want to achieve something that is liked by people, but the confusion is caused by how do we get there. There are 200 million ways to reach there, so we keep exploring them, and you can call this sound confused pop.”
The band members say that they are planning to release two more EPs this year. “Besides that a couple of film projects and OTT projects are going on. We want to explore the sounds and songs of India,” Rajarshi signs off.
You can listen to Ibtida on Spotify and other music streaming apps.
