New Album ‘Suburban Prose’ Showcases The Lightyears Explode’s Emotional Side

If you go back to the albums released in 2013 within the Indian independent music scene, one record that stands out is Mumbai pop/punk outfit The Lightyears Explode’s 10-track debut effort The Revenge of Kalicharan. Since then, the band’s lineup has altered, with drummer Jeremy D’Souza replacing Aaron Carvalho and guitarist Jishnu Guha aka Short Round coming on board as a live member, however, the group’s founders in vocalist-guitarist Saurabh Roy and bassist Shalom Benjamin have kept going strong.

With a four-track EP entitled Mellow released in 2020 and the bubbly “Nostalgia 99” that came out in 2021, The Lightyears Explode are now out with their first full-length album in 10 years in the shape of the eight-track Suburban Prose. Roy says, “I have immense respect for the album as a format. After we released our single ‘Nostalgia 99’ I started thinking about an album and felt ready to commit to the idea.” He adds, “I was aware of when our last album came out and didn’t want it to be more than 10 years between albums, so we pushed the release to this year.”

The band began teasing Suburban Prose earlier this year with the singles “Pills,” “Fighting With Your Family,” “Fake It! Shake It! Make It!” and “Big Big Love.” Ask Roy when the songs began taking shape for the record and he says, “Some ideas are older than our EP like ‘Literally Kicks,’ but I started assembling ideas and demos seriously at the end of 2021. These early demos changed dramatically during the [production] process and a lot of the songs were brand new. ‘Pills’ was the first completed song and set the standard and template we wanted for the album.”

The album that has been made is a superb-sounding body of work with the band’s deft touch of distortion and punk structures that sit perfectly together. “Sonically we wanted everything to be quite economical, we wanted loud and quiet dynamics,” says Roy.

Lyrically Roy wanted to pull back the curtain from the usual “bravado and confidence” we’d heard earlier. Across the album, the vocalist sings about things that make him feel vulnerable such as “mental health, decaying friendships, inter-family political differences and feeling unfulfilled with some social circles, but not knowing how to break out of it.”

Suburban Prose was produced by Roy while Benjamin and D’Souza contributed drums and bass respectively. Guha is also heard on the record and credited for additional guitar and backing vocals on a few of the songs. Ganesh Singaram mixed the album while Daniel Natoli produced it.

With this record now out of the way, the band is setting out to release a few more singles and are also prepping to record a live album. Roy says, “We feel really good about our live set and think it would be a good time to give it a shot.”

Stream ‘Suburban Prose’ on Spotify below and on other platforms.