We’ve just discovered Air Apparent. Apart from the name, we love his music! 

What began as an attempt to review his latest single Dance has now led us down a different path, thanks to YouTube playing the rest of his tracks in no particular order. Ordinarily, we’re a team of rockers and metalheads. Indian metalheads. It means we’ve grown up not having enough access to it, and having to fight with all and sundry, fending off taunts on how we look, dress and the ‘noise’ we listen to. So if we’re fucked up and otherwise overly critical of pop music, pardon us. We were long subjected to crappy music and crappier style choices on the part of our peers in our teens. But what most don't see is that Metalheads listen to everything (So don’t let that fool you). It also means that it’s usually only a handful of artists who have really impressed us. You’ll often find us saying something like, “I hate _____ music, but I really like _____!”

Now that we’re done with that particular rant, let’s talk about Neil Sethi, AKA Air Apparent. He’s good. Really good. Excellent. We loved Tokyo, which features the surreal vocals of Julia Ross. Man, her voice! With the lyrics, written by Sethi, we can literally feel the yearning there.

 A music video on the lines of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void is something we can totally see when we close our eyes to this particular track. In fact Sethi’s preferred colour palette is quite close to Noe’s film poster. 

Electro-pop doesn't always warm us up. A lot of it sounds like everything else in the genre, but Sethi surprises us once again with 2019’s Asking You. He’s versatile that way, especially with the EDM-esque bits that fit right in. Just a month ago, he released the earthy Cosmos featuring vocals by Constance. Stylistically, he sort of reminds us of Morcheeba’s 2002 album Charango in a sense where all tracks had a certain diversity in the way they were presented to the listener, yet one knew they were of the same artist (If this makes sense).

And finally, we come to Air Apparent’s newest release Dance. As the name suggests, it's an out-and-out clubbing track (Remember clubbing?). What's better is you end up listening to it again and again, because it's got that ear-wormy thing to it. The official lyric video has bits of Japan in it too. I guess we need to delve deeper into his love for the country, maybe another time.  

In an interview with UFO NETWORK he says, “My friend Lulu and I wrote this song together about the experience of meeting someone in a club, having no idea who they are, and not knowing what to say – but hoping to dance the nervousness away. It came from specific experiences we had both had but chosen never to act on. So in a way, it’s a projection of what we’ve both wanted to do having been in that situation. On a more abstract level, it’s a song about dancing your fears away. Dancing alone or with my girlfriend alone in my room has been a therapeutic escape during quarantine. I want people to know that sometimes it’s easy to get caught in your own head with anxiety and nervousness. But it’s possible to break out of it and physically pry yourself out of your own head by trying something fun, like starting to dance!"

Two things are for sure. One, we did want to get up and dance to it and two, we've subscribed to him. We're looking forward to seeing what Sethi conjures up next!