There are plenty of songs about being young and reckless, and there are plenty of songs about growing up and looking back. sxnchay’s Twentysomethings sets out to track the shift between those two feelings in real time, song by song, without flattening the mess of it into a single mood, and the fact that it pulls it off across nine tracks and thirty minutes without losing its nerve or its sense of humour is what makes it one of the more honest rap projects to have come out recently.
The mixtape is a joint effort between sxnchay (pronounced Sanchay, the X is deliberate) and Moonjock, a production duo made up of BKM and Sharan, also known as Mehraji. The three of them are at different points in their twenties, which turns out to be the structural backbone of the whole project. The tape is split into three distinct sections covering early, mid, and late twenties, and each section has its own sonic identity, its own emotional register, and its own version of the person making the music. It is a coming-of-age project that does not pretend coming of age is a single moment of clarity. It treats it as a slow, uneven, sometimes embarrassing process, which is far closer to how it actually works.
The first three tracks are early twenties energy through and through. SAUTELA opens the tape with the kind of bravado that only makes sense when you are twenty-one and consequences feel like something that happens to other people. The opening bars hit with a confidence that is almost confrontational, calling himself the stepchild of rap and making it sound like a flex rather than a complaint. The production across this section is loud and experimental, built on glitchy, floaty synths and syncopated trap-heavy drums that give sxnchay room to find his own melodic pocket without leaning on a traditional hook structure. HOMEWORK, WHITEE, and WOOF, the singles that preceded the tape, all live in this territory of high energy and playfulness, so listeners who came in through those tracks will feel at home here. But the tape is not interested in staying comfortable for long.
The mid-twenties section is where things start to shift. Tracks four through six move into the territory of self-doubt, ambition, and the creeping awareness that you might not have everything figured out the way you thought you did. PATHER PACHALI (intentionally spelled without the N, and yes, it is a nod to the Satyajit Ray film) is one of the most exposed moments on the tape. sxnchay has described it as looking into a mirror without turning away, and the writing backs that up. The bars are direct and uncomfortable in a way that the earlier tracks deliberately avoid, touching on wasted time, run-ins with authority, and the gap between who you are and who you planned to be by twenty-five. BKM makes his vocal debut on OBSESSED and SAPNE, and the addition of a second voice changes the texture of the project in a meaningful way. sxnchay has talked about being influenced by Brockhampton and Odd Future, and you can hear that here in the way multiple voices and perspectives layer over each other without competing. The production in this section leans into wobbly synths, ambient textures, off-key vocal samples, and heavily saturated soundscapes that feel deliberately unstable, like the ground is shifting under the music the same way it shifts under your life when you are twenty-five and trying to figure out if you are on track or falling behind.
The final third is where the tape lands, and it is the section that separates Twentysomethings from most other projects in this space. Sharan joins sxnchay and BKM on mic for the last three tracks, and the sonic palette changes dramatically. The trap instrumentals pull back to make room for softer pop textures, melancholic acoustic chord progressions, and vocal melodies that sit in your head long after the songs end. KET is a standout, a Brockhampton-style collaboration where all three voices trade lines about their relationship with their vices, and it apparently went through twelve different versions before landing on the final cut. The disagreements over structure, transitions, and what should repeat were intense enough to cause actual arguments within the group, which is the kind of detail that makes sense when you hear how tightly the song is put together. MARGOT is a ballad about the one that got away, built around a story that started as Sharan’s experience before sxnchay found his own way into it, and the result feels lived-in rather than performed. BAMBAI/BANGALORE closes the tape with a track about accepting that cities and circumstances can take people away from you, and that sometimes it is nobody’s fault even when it feels like it should be.
What makes the project work as a whole is that the three sections do not just represent different moods but different relationships with honesty. The early twenties tracks are honest in the way that showing off is honest, because at that age, the bravado is real even if it is not the full picture. The mid-twenties tracks are honest in the way that admitting doubt is honest, which is harder and less fun. And the late-twenties tracks are honest in the way that acceptance is honest, which is the hardest thing of all because it means sitting with what you cannot change. sxnchay has talked about how putting out vulnerable music scares him, and that fear is actually audible in the contrast between the first and last thirds of the tape. The early tracks sound like someone performing confidence, and the later tracks sound like someone who has stopped performing altogether.
The production from Moonjock deserves its own recognition. BKM and Sharan have built a sonic world across these nine tracks that shifts dramatically without ever losing coherence, and their ability to match the emotional arc of the writing with the right textures and arrangements is what holds the whole structure together. sxnchay has said that he lets the music decide what kind of song he is going to write rather than forcing a track to be something it is not, and that approach clearly works when your producers understand what you are trying to say before you have finished saying it.
Twentysomethings is thirty minutes long, which is exactly right. It does not overstay, it does not pad itself with interludes or skits that exist just to fill space, and it trusts its own structure enough to let each section do its job without over-explaining the concept. For a debut full-length collaboration between sxnchay and Moonjock, it is remarkably assured, and it suggests that whatever comes next from this group will be worth paying attention to. sxnchay has said there will not be a Thirtysomethings, but the tape does not need a sequel. It already captures something specific and true about what it feels like to be young in Indian cities right now, and it does it without romanticizing the mess or pretending the mess is not there.
