“Every song was heavily improvised"
EXCISE DEPT have released their second album, SHOPNOBHUMI, via Dialled In Records.
It draws on partition-era stories, patriotic songs and the oral histories that have shaped the collective’s understanding of home.
The 10-track album turns EXCISE DEPT’s archive-digging instincts inward, exploring how love, language and inherited memory influence ideas of belonging.
It follows their debut, SAB KUCH MIL GAYA MUJHE VOL. 1, which arrived two years ago with a distinctive collision of sample-heavy hip-hop, synth-funk, ambient noise and sharp humour.
On SHOPNOBHUMI, that experimental approach takes a more expansive form, with songs developing through extended passages of improvisation, repetition and texture.
According to the group, the process was partially influenced by a desire to step back from the methods they had previously relied on:
“We took 2025 to slow down and recalibrate some of the methods we had become accustomed to, and it was only natural to consult texts and songs already buried within our subconscious.”
The album was made in collaboration with electronic artist Sanjay Das, also known as Philtersoup, and developed through months of free-form sessions at EXCISE DEPT’s home studio.
Further recording and production took place at Island City Studios in Mumbai and Abbey Road Studios in London.
EXCISE DEPT added: “Every song was heavily improvised, and most of the tracks are a fully live recording without any metronome or grid.
“In each session, we’d have everything set up and move between stations freely.”
That approach is embedded in the album’s sound, with tape hiss, room tone, strings, synthesisers, drum machines and voices preserving traces of the recording process.
The new album is described as “akin to the Voyager Golden Record: a lost multilingual transmission drifting in the endless void”.
Across its Punjabi and Bengali storytelling, the album moves between vulnerable pleas and pointed challenges to the ideals that underpin nations and identities.
Images of rivers, roads, rain and dreams recur throughout the record, connecting personal experiences of separation with broader questions surrounding history, language and belonging.
The result is an album that looks at the idea of home as something shaped by memory, displacement and the stories passed down generations.
Opening track ‘NEEND‘ immediately establishes that sense of disorientation.
Blistering synthesisers and insistent electronic propulsion accompany a protagonist who struggles to recognise his own photograph and encounters people “made of brass” in an “iron city”.
The accompanying music video places slow-motion portraits of Mumbai during the monsoon alongside thermal-camera imagery, transforming familiar scenes of the city into something more unsettling and unfamiliar.
The album’s combination of live improvisation, archival influences and visual storytelling creates a record concerned as much with questions of identity and belonging as it is with musical experimentation.
After performances at Dialled In Festival in London, Oslo Hackney and Germany’s Reeperbahn Festival, EXCISE DEPT will tour India in late October and early November, visiting Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore, and Kolkata.
