“a lost multilingual transmission drifting through the endless void"
EXCISE DEPT have announced their second album, SHOPNOBHUMI, six years after emerging from the underground scenes of New Delhi and Mumbai.
The album arrives on October 9 via Dialled In Records, while the single ‘NEEND’ was released on September 25.
‘NEEND’ introduces a markedly different sound from the Mumbai-based group’s 2024 debut album, SAB KUCH MIL GAYA MUJHE VOL. 1.
The track moves away from frenetic hip-hop, collage-like sampling and internet culture, instead exploring ambient music, experimental electronics and largely improvised live performance.
EXCISE DEPT predominantly recorded SHOPNOBHUMI across home studios in Mumbai, Island City Studios and London’s Abbey Road Studios.
The album was created without a metronome or grid, allowing tape hiss, room ambience, fragmented voices, folk music motifs and electronic textures to remain part of the recordings.
Drawing on Partition-era stories, patriotic hymns and oral histories from the band’s upbringing, the album explores how personal and collective histories are inherited, remembered and reshaped.
EXCISE DEPT describe the album as “a lost multilingual transmission drifting through the endless void, akin to the Voyager Golden Record”.
From the beginning, ‘NEEND’ establishes this atmosphere, opening with the line:
“I looked at my photograph, and it looked like someone else.”
The track explores anxiety, alienation and emotional exhaustion as vocalist Karanjit Singh reflects on identity and isolation.
The music video extends these themes into Mumbai, where it was filmed during the city’s unforgiving monsoon.
As the film progresses, the city gradually dissolves into sleep, mirroring the track’s movement towards surrender.
The wider world of SHOPNOBHUMI can also be explored through EXCISE DEPT’s immersive website, which launched on August 25.
Built around geology, cartography and material memory, the digital environment allows visitors to navigate landscapes created from scans of rocks collected across India, Europe and the UK.
Within these landscapes are fragments of lyrics and isolated sonic elements from the album, alongside family and political archives, photographs, texts and maps.
EXCISE DEPT have developed the project entirely themselves, working across music, film, design and interactive media.
Their multidisciplinary approach allows the different elements of SHOPNOBHUMI to form part of the same creative world.
With the album due on October 9, ‘NEEND’ offers an early glimpse into a project that moves EXCISE DEPT towards a more expansive and experimental sound.
Listen to ‘NEEND’
