Dhruv Visvanath On Discipline, New Music and Appearing on 'My Kind Of Country'

"I still consider myself to be a student of life," says the New Delhi artist

- ANURAG TAGAT

New Delhi-based Dhruv Visvanath’s new music video for “Gimme Love” brings to the front the protagonist’s memories, achievements and past glories and failures that get a much-needed discarding, with filmmaker Tanvi Gandhi giving hoarded boxes life. While it might be a similar theme of everyday objects showing us their secret yet fairytale-like sentience that was seen in the video for “Wild” from 2018, the songwriting of “Gimme Love” moves in a different direction. Since the release of “Wild” and his album The Lost Cause in 2018, Visvanath took the route of releasing singles building up to his 2021 album The Book of I, which he carried into releasing his powerful 2022 EP Demons.

The first half of 2023 has been arguably Visvanath’s biggest, becoming a finalist on Apple TV+ show My Kind of Country – where he covered everyone from Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” to Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” alongside his own material in Nashville. Then, he collaborated with composer-producer Achint and Gujarati vocalist Aditya Gadhvi for the Coke Studio Bharat song “Khalasi,” called upon for his distinct percussive acoustic guitar strumming.

There’s still a bit of that jangly, crisp percussive and fingerstyle guitar technique heard on “Gimme Love,” but in a way that’s perhaps only supplementary to Visvanath’s pop songwriting, something he did with London-based Matty Benbrook. The latter’s credits range from Paolo Nutini to KT Tunstall and Jake Bugg, among others. In an interview with