Delhi’s Yatin Srivastava Project released their first full-length ‘Chaos/Despair’ in 2018. That album was proggy, heavy and subtle in equal measure and featured an illustrious cast of musicians including heavyweights like Craig Blundell and Bruce Soord. Yatin’s songwriting strength and willingness to not dumb things down was apparent for everyone to see and hear; their new single ‘All We Ever Wanted Was Nothing’ continues in that vein and keeps up the high standard Yatin set.

This song is heavy. The production of the track is its biggest asset and contains a lot of variety even though the focus is clearly on the skull-crushing grooves and huge guitars. The drums (credited to Arjun Mathur) sounds like cannons here and it’s impossible to not move to them. The guitars are in the space that progressive metal has made for itself in recent times; they are chunky and thick and leave nothing whatsoever to the imagination. These two elements fill up every bit of available space, making the listener almost drown in sound over the course of the song’s 4 minutes. It’s an approach a lot of bands take but a lot of times, the quality of the songwriting causes a headache instead of an immersive experience. That isn’t the case here. Yatin is doing vocals for the first time here and his voice is of the high and clean variety, which is pretty much perfect for a context like this. These are supplemented by some orchestration (which is a very modern thing to do) for the added emotion, some really hard-hitting bass from Archie Farrier and some synth tones from Andrew Simmons. The sonic palate of the track is pretty complete.

‘All We Ever Wanted Was Nothing’ could easily have been some overcomplicated pretentious nonsense considering everything that is going on in the song, but Yatin is smarter than that. The main thrust of the song is that it is really catchy. His vocal melodies are easy to sing along to (albeit you might not have the available octaves on tap), the ‘breakdown’ in the middle of the track is glorious chug and the riffs are true to form but very accessible. The strings and synths that support all this up the feels quotient a lot and provide a sort of contrast much the way bands like Tesseract and so on used them back when the genre was getting started. It’s also not unduly long or winding, wrapping up all its transitions and sections in relatively quick time. It’s far easier to remember everything and enjoy all the elements in these judicious doses. Above all, it’s a mark that Yatin and co. know what they are doing and are balancing respect for the genre and an enjoyable listen for the audience. ‘All We Ever Wanted Was Nothing’ accomplishes both of these in a good song. Headbang away.