Bengaluru band The Tramlines Project isn’t breaking new ground or seeking to turn post-rock on his head or anything overly grandiose with their single ‘Deep Trip’, but they manage to do something that a lot of the drab and morose music the genre has pushed over the years doesn’t: not ruin your day. Yes, hearing the layers upon layers of guitars with the reverb and the theatrical, slow grooves is an emotionally involved experience. In fact, some of the biggest emotional gut punches you can hear come from artists in the genre. But sometimes it all gets a bit heavy and all we want to hear is something that has emotion but also a little brightness and variation so that we can continue to live our life instead of contemplating our futile existence over a suddenly inconsequential morning coffee. This track is the ticket.

There’s some hopeful and positively contemplative about ‘Deep Trip’ right from the spacey synth chords that kick off the song. The mix on this is relatively bright and upfront, and while that does detract a little bit from the celestial experience it wants to be, it is quite nice for the elements used to be audible for once and not buried under a trillion layers on instrumentation. Rahul Seth takes the songwriting reins in this band, and he doesn’t particularly try to surprise you with switch-ups or sudden transitions. Aritra Das is similarly safe on drums, but that’s a good thing. When the main riff of the song (the loud part of the quiet-loud thing) comes in, it’s pretty simple and direct. The synths that accompany it are well written and the inevitable guitar solo isn’t mindless. A bit more heaviness could possibly have been more than welcome, but ‘Deep Trip’ is absolutely a solid outing and a piece of post-rock that actually generates something warm for once.