The nine years between Tu Hai and Indian Ocean’s prior full-length effort, 2014’s Tandanu, is the longest gap between the folk-fusion band’s albums. The protracted pause is owed, unsurprisingly, to the pandemic but also to assorted soundtrack work and a busy performance schedule. This second LP with the group’s current line-up—bassist Rahul Ram, drummer Amit Kilam, vocalist Himanshu Joshi, guitarist Nikhil Rao and percussionist Tuheen Chakravorty—picks up right where they left off, given that it “brings back some of the melodies that were left halfway but kept coming back in pieces to our compositions”, as they tell Apple Music. When the quintet took a step back and looked at the collection’s six songs, they realised that each could relate to a broader concern about environmental degradation—a theme reflected in the album art by illustrator Priya Brahmbhatt. “I remember being influenced by Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement,” Ram says, “in which he talks about climate change and how weird it is that artists are not at the forefront of bringing it up.” That Indian Ocean could use their music to highlight environmental issues was a notion that resonated with Ram’s bandmates. “The album and a lot of our songs carry certain Sufi-ish messages,” Kilam adds. “For me, the larger sense of spirituality is linked to nature as a whole. The divine being may or may not be just the photo that you see but also the trees and the rivers and the mountains.” In a manner of speaking, Indian Ocean have already become one of the more sustainably minded acts on the scene. The band have a zero-waste policy of sorts, frequently repurposing old arrangements and ideas that have been left out of the final versions of previous songs—a practice repeatedly employed for Tu Hai. Ram and Kilam take us through the making of the album’s six tracks. “Jaadu Maaya” Kilam composed the tune on which “Jaadu Maaya” is based back in 2010, when he used it to test out his brand-new home studio in Faridabad. “I have the recording somewhere on a Mac,” he says. It was extracted from the vault when Indian Ocean created the soundtrack to 2015 Hindi film Masaan with lyricist Varun Grover. “As the film evolved,” Ram says, “[the film producers] came to the conclusion that this song is not fitting [in the movie]. So the song was dropped but by then we had fallen in love with the tune.” The band asked Grover to pen new lyrics and the result was “Jaadu Maaya”. “This is the first time Varun has written a song specifically for Indian Ocean,” Ram adds. “The lyrics are an unusual combination of hope and despair.”

“Jungle” Among the oldest songs in Indian Ocean’s repertoire, “Jungle” was built around lyrics given to the band by actor and kathakali dancer Arjun Raina in the 1990s. They dug it out in January 2015 after they met American saxophonist George Brooks backstage after his concert in New Delhi with violin player Kumaresh Rajagopalan, with whom the band had collaborated on Tandanu. Brooks expressed a desire to work with the group so they invited him for a jam session at their studio, where they on tried Raina’s lyrics and their initial composition for size. It took them just a couple of days to finish it. “We performed it with George live at Symbiosis [college in Pune] after having recorded it [over] the previous two days,” Ram says.

“Is Tann Dhan” Indian Ocean’s version of the Kabir bhajan of the same name, “Is Tann Dhan” is a song Ram says he’s been hearing “since I was born”. He adds: “My father used to sing this. I always used to think of it as pretty sombre because he would sing it at funerals. But it has a beautiful tune and we wanted to do something with it. We [started working on it] before [founding member and guitarist] Susmit [Sen] left the band [in 2013]. This is one of those songs [that] was stagnant for several years. Then one day, [guitarist] Nikhil Rao said, ‘I think we can take it in this direction.’” 
The track features legendary ghatam player Vikku Vinayakram, with whom the band reconnected at the same concert in Delhi where they met Brooks. “Anything that is rhythmically not simple is something in which you would want somebody like Pandit Vikkuji to participate,” says Ram. “Nobody really knows who made the original tune. We have taken it and modified it significantly. When it moves from [a 14-beat cycle] to a normal eight, from there on the tune changes; it becomes like a rock song. We played a version of it in 2015 at Siri Fort and my dad was in the audience. He was happy [with what we had done]. I wish he was around [today], he would have loved hearing what we did with Vikkuji.”

“Tu Hai Part 1” and “Tu Hai Part 2” Based around a Kashmiri folk rhythm composed by Kilam, “Tu Hai”—which is among the band’s more recent songs—was inspired by the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan qawwali “Tum Ek Gorakh Dhanda Ho”. “He speaks about God or the supreme being,” Kilam says, “and he keeps questioning at every line, that you are there but you can’t be seen, so how do I know you’re [really] there? It’s magnificent poetry. I told my bandmates, ‘Why don’t we go towards this thought process?’ Rahul and Himanshu wrote [the lyrics] in an hour or two and Nikhil added this beautiful drop-down section [on the guitar].”

 However, at first they couldn’t quite bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. “There is one guy,” Kilam says, “let’s say [he’s] the seeker, who’s asking, ‘Where is God? I’m looking here and I’m looking there.’ Then [there’s] a person who does not believe in God who says, ‘If there is a God, then why are all these bad things happening?’ The song was not getting closed because we have a beautiful Kashmiri line that seeks and then we have a Hindi line that’s uncertain about God’s existence. Himanshu thought of singing some words from Baba Bulleh Shah which are pretty simple but most of the world never really understands, which is that if you are really nice and good inside, that’s the God you’re looking for.”

When they tried it out in a live setting, the band faced another hitch. “Rahul and I both felt that it was meandering a little too much, at least for the stage,” Kilam says. “So he came up with this idea of [splitting] it. The songs are connected by the same riff but they have slightly different spaces. One is a very upbeat, guitar-and-drum thing. The other one is rock ’n’ rock all the way.” Ram adds: “The first part asks the question and the second gives the answer.”

“Rebirth” Like most of the group’s songs, “Rebirth” originated with the band trying out different ideas that had been suggested by each of the members. In this case, it was an opening riff, a guitar solo from Rao and a vocal line by Kilam. This line had been recycled from an unfinished song Kilam made with vocalist, lyricist and actor Piyush Mishra and singer-songwriter Monica Dogra in 2012 while the three of them were working on the music TV series The Dewarists. Indian Ocean have been performing “Rebirth” as a frequent concert-opener since 2015 but took a while to settle on what to name the track. “Nikhil Rao wanted to call it ‘Jeejivisha’, which is a Sanskrit word that means ‘a strong will to live’,” Ram says. “We decided that that’s too complicated. ‘Rebirth’ really tied in with the theme of the album. That we need a rebirth [and] need to rethink various things if we are to escape from this thing that will otherwise destroy us. Instrumental tracks are the toughest to name. For me, the vocal line is what pushed me to think of ‘rebirth’ because it comes in at the end in a stronger way.”