Please don’t tell me about tonality and velocity and control – drums need to be whacked. There’s really no way around it. Or at least they need to sound like they’ve been hit hard; whacked with not inconsiderable strength. It sounds cool and right. You can throw your pirated smooth jazz collection and your intricately-crafted passages of progressive wizardry in my face and I will cover my ears and yell garbled profanities.

FuzzCulture’s new release, which they’ve called Indulge.Divulge, makes that impact. They’re an electronica duo from New Delhi that doesn’t believe in the spacebar key and writes rhythmically stiff and forceful music with melody scattered all around. But – make no mistake – behind all the smooth production and tight structures and processed drums and samples and whizzing and whirring hypnotic sounds made on Macbook Pros lies a rock ‘n’ roll heart. Each of the six songs on the EP follows a simple dictum: raw and powerful songwriting countered with inherently slick production values. A dynamic and persuasive sense of groove is established right from the eponymous album opener, and the whole thing sort of stems from there, with all the songs having a kick-and-snare punch that’s supported by the synths and effects around it; the masculine frenzy often threatening to take over. There’s also the occasional guitar line strewn across, with the extended out-passage on ‘Pizkiatone’ capturing a very charming melodic sensibility with an acoustic doodle that jumps out from underneath the distorted rhythm.

The songs do follow a rehearsed structure that gets a little repetitive after a few listens – everything is all-action and frantic and punchy; there’s no soft to emphasize the heavy and one suspects that maybe these guys need to chill out a bit every now and then. The sporadic singing, which is mostly heavily processed, works pretty well within the framework of the sound. Of course, the few places where the vocal effects are bypassed, it ends up sounding a little amateurish and high-school, although the actual tunes still remain pleasant and endearing. And the moments of flair on the album that flit in and out make the little flaws comfortably endurable – it’s an admirable debut with very little pretensions about it, with a special mention about the lovely artwork accompanying the release. 

Stream Indulge.Divulge here