Sayanta Bose makes music under a project called Mezzanine Bay. On his debut single, he goes the route many artists went not too long ago; the synth-heavy and psychedelic world of Tame Impala-ish rock music. Do y’all remember that craze? Boxy drums, an entire guitar store’s worth of flangers and modulation pedals, and vocals that were semi-buried in a dense, swirling mix? That sound migrated to hip-hop, but ‘Inarticulate Ro’ stays squarely in the rock realm, and happily so.

All sound-related talk aside, no song in this style would ever work without good writing. Sayanta does this; the chords on the verses and pre-choruses are straight-up pleasant, accompanied by very listenable vocal melodies. Add a simple groove and we are well on our way. Until the halfway point of the track, that is, when there’s an unexpected fade-out into a completely different piano-backed section. This develops into a lo-fi downtempo motif that completely shifts the mood of the song. This is smart songwriting because it guides the listener into a new vibe while using exactly the same set of tools, as it were.

The operative word is ‘smart’. A song like ‘Inarticulate Ro’ has all the trappings of music anyone can pigeonhole and label in the first 30 seconds of its 5-minute runtime, but what Mezzanine Bay does is introduce enough variety in structure to delay that thought by, well, 5 whole minutes. Not once during the song would you stop vibing to say “Oh, this sounds like…”, and that is proof that the song is a little bit more than just its sound. Nice!