Even If You Beat Me opens with the line “everything is boring,” and yet it’s anything but. There isn’t a dull second on it.
The EP feels like the soundtrack to a house party the listener has been invited to. It was mastered by Grammy-nominated Andrew Garver, produced by Sidharth Gupta of Green Park and released through his new independent label, Indimints Records, it explores love, identity, purpose, ennui, and defiance against the backdrop of a move to a new city and the uncertainty of building a career. It also traces falling in love and the tenderness, anger, ache, and decay that can come with it, alongside friendship, yearning, and the extraordinary joy of life.
Love Beams is a banger, straight outta America’s 20s pop. Lana Del Rey-esque lyrical lore plays out over a bop beat, and a lush, textured sound unfolds around it. The highlight is Abhiraj’s verse wrapped around Indrani’s voice, a perfect complement.
I don’t get existential
But still can’t go to bed
And I have never been better without
The thought of you in my head
Not Today addresses the point in a relationship where the same fight keeps repeating. It isn’t asking for the relationship to be fixed forever, just for an evening without another fight, a slight breather, a little reprieve.
Not today, baby please,
Can we find something else to do?
Like
Make my living room a bar
Say baby baby you’re a star
Money is indie pop with a confessional, slightly bitter, emotionally messy edge. A catchy chorus sits alongside lyrics about heartbreak over someone who clearly values money and ambition over the relationship.
Worms is sung with a slight choke in the voice as if the vulnerability in the lyrics carries a weight that words alone cannot express.
You open up a cup of worms when you
try to answer my doubts
No, keep it to yourself, won’t you?
I can find my way out
If earnestness is so painful, baby
Tell me another lie
Superhero reminds me of the indie songs I loved growing up, the quality I found as a teenager in the music of some of my favourite indie bands.
Paper Boats closes the EP.
Competing with AI, makes me wanna die
Can you distract me from humanity?
Throughout, touches of Lorde, Wet Leg, Wolf Alice, Arctic Monkeys, and Lana Del Rey surface, in a pop sensibility that is as vulnerable as it is striking. From the duet “Love Beams” to the indie-rock swagger of “Not Today,” the banger “Money,” the devastating “Worms,” the ballad “Superhero,” and the pure pop of “Paper Boats,” the range is so wide the EP feels either full of genres or free of them altogether.
That suits Indrani, who has “a strong distaste for rigid genres” and trusts listeners to decide for themselves, though she calls it “just pop f*****n music.”
Indrani lays her bones bare, channelling the ghost of personal experience into something beautifully spectacular.
