KIMKID is a project helmed by Arjun Mukherjee, who is a songwriter and composer. He’s been around the scene for quite a while now, playing in different setups while also making his own stuff. His new single (the first one under this sort of artist rebrand) is a song called ‘Haiwan’, a collaboration with a producer named DeepC and Kashmiri singer/poet Ahmad Parvez. ‘Haiwan’ deserves interest because it does something which does not happen too often; its sound and lyrical matter are diametrically opposite to each other in vibe, but the overall product is cohesive. That’s odd.

What your ears will find is a song of two halves. One is the instrumentation and composition, which is firmly in the world of arena rock. Plenty of riffs, quick lead sections, very groovy drums (which seem to be played on a sequencer or drum machine but sound very good anyway, even in this rock context; probably because DeepC knows what he’s doing) and more. There’s a nice bridge and a solo that takes advantages of how very pop blues-rock can sometimes sound. To be fair, if you can stretch far enough in your mind, you could maybe pick out a vague reference to 90s grunge too.

The second half is what Ahmad is saying. The song tells the story of the experience he had not being able to contact people close to him in Kashmir in 2019 during the time of the abrogation when he was out of state and his loved ones were back home. There’s some wistfulness, the direct feeling of someone who was in the situation of that time (and not commenting on it from afar), and of course, the sadness of a person affected by it. This is not the breezy floating-on-a-cloud stuff one would expect to find on a song like this, but that is what it is. And maybe it is that very thing that makes ‘Haiwan’ a compelling listen.

Here, the two main parts of the rock genre in general (sound and words) go in completely opposite directions emotionally, and this push and pull ends up in a song that isn’t what it seems to be on the surface. Interesting.