Smiti Malik’s debut solo EP : Sad Songs for A Sunday, is confessional in nature. This is a fairly obvious observation — because Malik starts off the record with an onslaught of her feelings, absolving the necessity for wordless musical negative space immediately. One becomes fairly acquainted with the tone of the album a few minutes into the first song — one, because of the project title, which invokes a kind of sentimental, verbose lyricism. Two, with the EP cover art featuring a monochrome shot of Malik perched on a chair, staring forlornly into the distance with the title scribbled in blue onto the corner. The stage is set for your expectations : here is a record endangered by production trends desperately training into exaggerations of electronica, the early 2000s trend of the independent prosaic songwriter trying to let things out, rather than just perform.
Malik is a mature songwriter, and it is refreshing to hear her begin the album sad, instead of building a slow spiral that one knows would inevitably come. Back On The Floor Again has a domestic quality of living through grief, the kind one feels while synchronizing breakdowns with the cycles of washing machines. One summer, swallowing down the last dregs of a particularly bad situation on the romance horizon, I had fallen into a routine — going through the motions of life languidly and dreading every moment of it, feeling the edges of knives and yet not acquainting myself to them too much. Between chores, I had taken to reading memoir after memoir of separations written by women — to form a cosmology to what I was feeling. All of this is to say that Malik’s work falls into the same gravitational field, perhaps, and this is not meant to be taken as an act of reductionism, merely alignment.
The EP does not venture much into experimentation, there are no sonic interventions that you make stall, and neither are there highs and lows that scream for your attention. There is the typical band arrangement for an indie-rock song to hammer in the intensity of emotion – and perhaps that is the intention. This is a project conceived in confinement, as Malik says, “I wrote these songs during the pandemic, a time that shaped both their emotional core and sonic direction. I think of these songs as love songs written for sadness; written at a time when both felt somewhat inseparable.” This tracks with the circularity of the record, where the artist is agonized by the monotony of her own angst, although it does translate into the project sounding a little dreary.
One cannot take the full record in at once. Not that it is particularly enormous, the EP teeters on being a little boring, because one knows what to anticipate by simple pattern-recognition. The title track, Sad Songs For A Sunday, does offer respite — and you can hear in the New Delhi based artist’s vocal range more clearly, and the light orchestral direction is promising, although it leaves you craving for more. What comes through, however, with startling clarity is Malik’s prowess at songwriting. She can casually say the words “I don’t wanna be your garden” or “You know sadness lives in the spine” without sounding like she is free-balling calligraphy.
There is a quaintness to the kind of sound Malik is going for, and it reminds me of a Hayley Williams project in the same vein, titled flowers for vases/descansos, a departure from her glorious rock numbers of sorrow for a meditative sitting with the spectre of all things morose and yet consuming. And perhaps, projects like Malik’s are necessary, to dwell without feeling antsy for more, to slow things down to the bone, and to revel in the gnawing of living through it all.
