Premiere: Prog Band The Pulse Theory Adventure Into Love, War and More on Debut Album ‘Coming Back Home’

Prog adventurism is the name of the game on Bengaluru band The Pulse Theory’s debut full-length album Coming Back Home, streaming in all its grandiose rock and metal glory ahead of its official release on August 28th.

The eight-track album was made over the last two years with The Pulse Theory teaming up with Mumbai-based guitarist-producer Keshav Dhar, from prog act Skyharbor. For fans of everyone from Opeth to Dream Theater to Leprous, there’s a bit of that shimmering, operatic prog sound heard on Coming Back Home, which deals with love, war, family and conflicts of the inner soul.

Comprising vocalist Avishek Dasgupta, guitarist Arijit Dey, drummer Antariksh Pandey, keyboardist Arjun Menon and bassist Siddharth Singh, The Pulse Theory set the tone to be airy with “Memories Divine” and scale more wiry prog heights at a galloping heavy metal-informed pace on “The Vanquished The Victor.” Elsewhere “The Far Beyond” twists and turns, while spacey elements populate “Everytime.” The album closes out with a trio of songs that showcase the range of the band – from screaming harmonics on the title track “Coming Back Home,” epic-scale songwriting “Troubled Child” and djent-level riffage on “Fallacy of Mind” featuring Rahul Basu.

Below, The Pulse Theory’s Avishek Dasgupta talks about the road to taking Coming Back Home and how they ended up writing love songs. Excerpts:

How long was Coming Back Home in the works? How did the decision to bring Keshav on board for production come about?

Coming Back Home has been in the works for a couple of years, and is almost a homage to the music we have created over time. Some of the songs on the album were composed more than five/six years back. Once the album was conceptualized in late 2021, we decided to pull it all together, adding some new tracks and evolving the previous material into something more impactful.

Keshav had produced our 2018 EP Meteors In Ascent and he was the obvious choice for this album. He kindly agreed to take this up and we instantly knew we will end up creating something special.

Apart from his musical and production mastery, Keshav is an absolute pleasure to work with and has infinite patience through the entire rigmarole of producing an ambitious record! We love the fact that he has made the album sound so grand and conjured up a mix only Keshav can.

According to you, how different of a direction do the tracks off this album feel like compared to previous Pulse Theory originals?

We believe the essence of this album lies in the fact that the entire band has played a role in the composition/creation part of it, and as a result each song has grown organically into something bigger than the original idea!

Compared to our previous releases, we have strived towards enhancing the production value to lend a certain finesse. Alongside, we have tried to bring in intricacies that we have learned over time. The idea was to create a record which is multi-faceted, heavy yet soulful… melodic yet angry, and takes the listener on a journey while experiencing varied emotions along the way.

Over time, as a band that has performed covers, tribute gigs and original material, what has it been like keeping the album as part of the vision?

Ever since we started our journey in 2014 our focus has always been on original music. For an Indian progressive rock/metal band that’s never the easiest route and we have had our share of listless days.

In the recent past we have received accolades for our Steven Wilson tribute and played a bunch of shows, but the end goal was always to release the album to showcase this evolved original sound. In fact, most of the shows we did recently were to gather enough funds to produce the album, it was like a double incentive scheme!

It has been a memorable journey, with camaraderie and self-belief at the very core of it. While playing tributes is always great fun, going forward we hope this is the starting point from where we take our original music places. That will be our core focus and we hope the album creates that kind of resonance

Coming Back Home has a few love songs. What inspired that? In a sense, is it challenging a perception that prog bands aren’t restricted to only certain themes/ concepts?

Starting from a point where we never wrote love songs to having three in an album is quite an advancement! On this record, we have explored different concepts of love and its accompanying elements. ‘Memories Divine’ is about the fluctuating patterns of love and how we fall in and out of it, ‘Everyime’ is almost a metal take on misogyny, about a man who takes his partner for granted until she walks out on him, ‘Fallacy of Mind’ reminisces a luckless love story.

We generally adopt a storytelling model in our lyrics writing. Some of the other songs in the album talk about concepts like the futility of war (‘Coming Back Home’), inner conversations of a conflicted soul (‘Far Beyond’), the reunion of a father and son who went astray (‘Troubled Child’). So we try to mix it up to the best extent possible! A commonality would perhaps be the general sense of pathos underlying each narrative.

What else is coming up through 2023 now that this album is coming out?

Once the album is released, we have a launch gig as part of ‘Prog Encounters’ at Fandom, Bangalore on September 17th.

The entire event has been curated by us and we have two other Bangalore-based prog bands, Geometry Box and Space Remedy, joining us for a night of predominantly original prog music. Such an event hasn’t happened in a while and we are all working towards creating a grand experience!

We will be playing most of the songs off the album and have some amazing guest acts joining our set!

For the future, we will hopefully get around to curating a full-fledged tour. We are in talks with some fantastic acts and looking forward to playing on certain unexplored shores!

A music video is indeed on the cards and will be our next big project, it was a unanimous decision to produce a video for ‘Memories Divine’ and hoping to release that in the next couple of months!