Yatin Srivastava Project Drops Shapeshifting New Song ‘I Wish You Would Stay Up Late and Dance With Me’

New Delhi-bred guitarist, producer and singer-songwriter Yatin Srivastava understands the essence of progressive rock and metal like few others in the country right now. Pushing into different directions and forging sonic alloys, his latest song “I Wish You Would Stay Up Late and Dance With Me” is testament to Srivastava’s goals beyond just riffs and polyrhythmic time signatures.

What’s more, the dark, electronic-informed rock song – his first solo, non-collaborative release since the 2018 album Chaos//Despair – is part of a remix EP called Quarantine 1.5. Even when working with producers who picked up songs from the 2021 EP Quarantine Vol. 1, Srivastava picked New Delhi hip-hop duo Shoals (who took on “Ikigai”), Karbi Anglong artist The’ang Theron aka Madhatter (“Breathe”) and London-based DJ-artist Bigwaft (“Disengage”).

“I Wish You Would Stay Up Late and Dance With Me” ebbs in and out of guitar phrases, but Srivastava’s digitized vocals and cinematic pop/R&B-esque production are even more arresting. He terms it a “genre-less” song that sums up a new side to him. The artist adds in a statement, “Initially, I decided just to leave it [this song] to the side considering how alien it was to anything I’d done musically in the past, but I thought this remix EP was the perfect place to put it because in a sense, it’s a remix of the styles of music I delve into. Considering that the point of the EP was to take already-existing musical pieces and transform them majorly, I think this song perfectly encapsulates my intention of wanting to remix everything — including the sound Yatin Srivastava Project has come to be known for.”

Name-checking artists like Bon Iver, Kanye West, 070 Shake, Polyphia and Chon as influences, “melancholia” is the prominent mood of the track, according to Srivastava. While work is underway for the next Yatin Srivastava Project material, the artist took on a remix EP after his own experience of being handed a chance at chopping up a song, courtesy of New Delhi singer-producer Komorebi aka Tarana Marwah. Srivastava remixed “Hide” from Komorebi’s remakes album Ninshiki in 2020. “The remix that I made for Tarana was really fun to do, and I thought that trying to do that for my own set of songs would be a brilliant opportunity to have other artists that I love come in and reimagine my songs through their musical lenses.”

Listen to “I Wish You Would Stay Up Late and Dance With Me”