Rhythm divine

Making music is a labour of love, but when you dip into the familiar sounds you've always known in your heart, it can feel like a homecoming. BHANUJ KAPPAL speaks to a genre-bending artist collective split between Mumbai and Delhi, a Sri Lankan French singer-songwriter and a New York-based sitarist about watering the roots they emerged from

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EXCISE DEPT

TO BE ONLINE in 2025 is to suffer constant psychological whiplash. Our algorithms flit from atrocity porn to cat memes, feeding us political rage bait one minute and cheerful makeup videos the next. Conventional wisdom says that the appropriate way to deal with this brain-rot dystopia is to touch grass, maybe ‘practise mindfulness’.

Excise Dept has never really cared for wisdom. The Mumbai-New Delhi artist collective leans into the messiness of our digitally networked lives, finding inspiration in everyday absurdity. Whatsapp University forwards, esoteric political theories, Pakistani meme videos—all serve as source material for its particular brand of internet-fried surrealism, where high-minded ideology meets low-brow shitposting.

The music on the group's 2024 debut album, Sab Kuch Mil Gaya Mujhe Vol 1, is an uncategorisable bricolage of instrumental hip-hop, synth-funk, Punjabi folk, ambient noise and ’90s Bollywood vocal flip, with lyrics sung and rapped in Hindi, English, Punjabi and Bengali. One moment the band is name-dropping masala film directors Abbas-Mustan; the next, it’s calling out late-stage capitalism.

The collective came together in 2020, during the early months of the pandemic. Producer-composer-vocalist Rounak Maiti, producer-composer Siddhant Vetekar and creative producer-manager Andrew Sabu spent much of the lock-down hanging out at each other’s homes in Navi Mumbai, cooking up musical experiments and WhatsApping them to Maiti’s college friend Karanjit Singh, who would quickly write and record Punjabi rap verses over the demos. “It wasn't serious; we were just talking trash basically,” Maiti says. “Over time, our engagement with the material got deeper. It became a way to collectively process the trauma we were all going through.”