Now that we’ve all admitted to ourselves that the idea of musical nostalgia has gone from a genuine feeling to yet another trend everyone is co-opting whether they are familiar with a sound’s origin or not, it’s getting more and more satisfying to see artists actually doing it right. One of them is Sidharth Bendi, who will transport you right back to a time of VH1, the Wild West that was turn-of-this-century pop music, and illegally downloaded MP3s that had “(radio edit)” in the song title. Sidharth puts a lot of effort into capturing that vibe with his own original writing on the unabashedly glitzy single ‘2006’ (an apt title), and delivers in spades.

‘That vibe’, of course, is to be completely over-the-top in every possible, good way. His vocals have that fluttery, light, nimble sound that characterized the era. No one back then could write a vocal melody without every lyric having a zillion R&B vocal runs and barely any real sustained notes; this is also faithfully followed. There’s every single you could imagine in this mix; acoustic guitars, 808s, reversed sampling, synths, bass, layered chorus vocals Justin Timberlake would have happily written (in fact, it seems like his music is a big influence here), and then, there’s the last third of the song where thing get even more maximalist. Without warning, we are thrown into a section with big, grand strings, literal Bollywood vocals, and some tabla to boot. Even this is not off brand for the 2000s pop that Sidharth (credit to fantastic additional production from Vavae and KASYAP) is taking a few cues from. So much music was sampling Indian or Middle-Eastern popular music that decade. We’ve just forgotten about it, and ‘2006’ serves as a fresh reminder of how much fun that time was. Complete sensory overload, not even a passing mention of the word ‘subtlety’, but an absolute blast. Give the song a shot and lighten up a bit.