Exclusive Premiere: Dhruv Visvanath Breaks Free on ‘Jungle’

For his previous music videos, New Delhi acoustic artist Dhruv Visvanath kept it simple, sticking to a well-shot performance of songs like “The Enigma” and “Four” (both off his 2015 debut album Orion).

To introduce fans to his new album The Lost Cause, he chose the inspiring, pop melody-strung song “Jungle” and teamed up with Hyderabad-based filmmaker Kartik Parmar for a video with a story.

Visvanath””known for his percussive approach and fingerstyle guitar technique that is laced with stick-in-your-head vocal hooks on “Jungle””talks at length about how the video of a bony young man stepping out of his confines reflects the lyrics. But then he adds jokingly about how the video will serve as an identifier. “Hopefully someone will one day say to me, ”˜Hey, I saw something in a jungle. Was that you?’ Then I could obviously either pass it off to me or bigfoot.”

Parmar and Visvanath started off with a visual cue of a room and the sense of being trapped. The singer-songwriter says the idea resonated with him on a persona level. “I felt I was going through a stressful time, a time where I would just hide from, problems, and conflict, and would resort to, eating a lot, and going silent and hiding from the people I loved most,” Visvanath says.

“Jungle”–mixed by Keshav Dhar and mastered by Vivek Thomas–certainly feels confessional as much as it aims for emotional evocation. Visvanath says, “With the work I’d put in to my craft over the last few years, I really felt the pressure to put a lot of work in for the next thing I had to release, and the sheer weight of expectations got to me, big time. I guess I too was running from my own shadow.”

The song’s emphasis on a pop-like dependence on melodies says a lot about how Visvanath is probably no longer on intending on making music to show off guitar techniques. On The Lost Cause””crowdfunded a couple of months ago and set to release in February””he says it was “important for me to really reign it in.” He adds, “This time around, I decided to take a step back and focus on what I think makes the music great in the first place. Allow people to be enveloped in the music than be a spectator. That was the main idea.”

Watch the video for “Jungle”