Spindle Radar: Young the Giant Teases New Music Era with Act 1: Origins

US indie-rock band Young The Giant are returning with an incredible new project, celebrating and incorporating Indian mythology and fusing Bollywood themes into a reinvigorated and thought-provoking new sound. The band are due to release their upcoming fifth album, ‘American Bollywood’ in four acts over the next few months with ‘Act 1: Origins’ now available to stream globally. The full album is out on October 21st. 

We caught up with lead vocalist Sameer Gadhia about Act 1, the upcoming album, and what we can do as music fans to address key issues surrounding diversity and inclusivity within the industry.

Hi Sameer! First of all, huge congratulations on the release of Act 1, we absolutely love it. How does it feel to have the first instalment of the new album out into the world?

It feels cathartic. This has been a four year process: hundreds of songs, massive life changes. It’s good to be back. 

What have you all been up to between ‘Mirror Master’ and now?

We’ve parted ties with our longstanding record label, and after over a decade, we are finally independent. Three of us have had children. My second son is on the way. We wrote a whole album in one and a half years, shuffle deleted, and wrote American Bollywood in three years. I struggled with…life. I have more white hairs now. 

We absolutely love the concept for ‘American Bollywood’, both with injecting themes of Indian mythology and releasing the album in four acts. Could you talk us through this concept in a little more detail and why you decided to go in this direction for album five?

It’s something I’ve just been obsessing over for years now. I don’t think I was ready to tell the story pre-pandemic. At first, I considered it as a solo album, and then I realized: the mythology is about five brothers: the Pandavas. Who better to bring this concept to and help shape it than the band? Even though I’m the only Indian, we are all immigrants: brothers. The exodus to find identity was the unifying piece for all of us, and together we’ve spent years finding the sounds for this story to belong to. 

The music video for title track, ‘American Bollywood,’ is incredibly powerful and the home video clips are beautiful. It seems to have strongly resonated with fans online, which must be amazing to see. What was the creative process behind the making of this video?

I brought a concept of the album, and a loose idea for a larger film that could encompass this whole album, to friend and collaborator, Tanmay Chowdhary. Tanmay had the idea of taking the surreal to Bombay Beach in the Salton Sea: a lustre-faded town of old Hollywood folklore. The name was more than fitting, as this video aims to tell the story of Partition, Immigration, and Existentialism. 

How does Act 1 compare sonically to the rest of the album?

The record has a lot of breadth. In Mahabharata, the first act describes Pandavas’ early years, and we wanted this introduction to feel hopeful and free. Things start to darken and warp, eventually finding their way back in Denouement with a larger retinue of instrumentation. We’ve been obsessed with the influence of diasporic South Asian music over rock music through the decades. Psychedelia, Grunge, Pop. So we’ll find ourselves in all these places. 

You are very vocal about your heritage and advocating for better diversity and inclusion within the music industry, so much so you were highlighted in Variety’s Inclusion Impact Report this year. How does it feel to be recognised for your work in this area?

In some ways it’s gratifying, in others, it’s frustrating about how much there is left to do. I’m also hyper aware of the incentivization of “cultural diversity,” and the problems of me benefitting from it. It doesn’t address the real problem. So that’s always a conversation in my head. 

As an industry and also as music fans, how should we be addressing these key issues?

We should try and find disparate sounds: music genres in places you wouldn’t think to look. Because under that rock, shit is popping. We need to stop using genre to codify race, and bring it back to the sonics. All categorization is problematic, both artistically and existentially, but if we are going to call a black punk artist hip-hop, then we are allowing our bias to bleed too deeply into the way we experience art. 

Nearing two decades from the conception of Young The Giant and five albums later, what do you wish you could go back and tell yourselves when you were starting out?

I know this time is confusing and hard, and it’ll take you a decade to figure out who you really fucking are. But, be patient. 

What new artists are you listening to at the moment that you’d love to share with the world?

Dijon, Jean Dawson, Spill Tab, Simpson, and more.  Check out more on my Sirius show, Point of Origin. More coming soon. 

Make sure to listen to Young The Giant’s new EP Act 1: Origins here or below.