‘Afraid of Feeling So Great’: Green Park’s Moody Melodies of Separation and Growth
Newly Aged (2024), the debut album by Green Park, is an experimental, cross-cultural rock project that responds to the uncertainties of transition, joy, and the life ahead.
If Newly Aged—the debut album by Delhi-based indie band Green Park—was to have a thesis statement, a song that attempts to define its narrative ambitions, it wouldn’t be a song at all. Midway through the short, airtight album—27 brisk minutes of moody, musical experimentation—the music takes a break for the interlude track, “Yahan-Wahan”, literally, here and there. The band allows listeners a moment to breathe, and instead, presents an intermission filled with sounds of honking traffic and chirping birds, the urban and the natural worlds encroaching upon each other, followed by soundscapes and snippets that hint of movement and migration.
It’s a reminder of a pot being stirred, of relationships disrupted by distance, of a struggle to come to terms with the environment and the self.
These themes—and more—overpower Green Park’s music, much of which marries the melodies of the psychedelic 60s with an omnipresent weight of modern synths as well as Indian string and percussion instruments. Released in March 2024, Newly Aged is Green Park’s second major project after their 2022 acclaimed EP All My Pictures Have Grown Smiles (both projects were mastered by Grammy-nominated mastering engineer Andrew Garver). Fronted by singer-songwriter/guitarist Arpan Kumar, recording engineer and bassist Sidharth Gupta, and recording engineer and percussionist Rishab Bhan Singh, Green Park take an ambitious step forward with New Aged, presenting an album that responds to the uncertainties of transition, joy, and the life ahead.
Newly Aged has the contradictory quality of a neatly-trimmed rough draft: in their press packet, the band revealed that they, “chose to record their rhythm section on most songs live without the aid of a metronome, opting to preserve the push and pull in tempo and minor imperfections that come with this method.” Despite the implementations of these deliberate imperfections, however, no moment in Newly Aged is wasted, each decision feels carefully planned and engineered—including the closer “Papita” a home-recorded ode to the eponymous cat. This attention to detail shines in the high production quality for the short duration of the album.
And even in the delivery of its soft, atmospheric tones, the album features no shortage of grand musical ambitions, as Green Park collaborated with a number of prominent Indian and international musicians—including Grammy-nominated sarod player Sashank Navaladi, jazz saxophonist William Schade, singer-songwriter Amartya Ghosh, pianists Pranay Parti and Omree Gal-Oz, trumpeter Kartik Pillai, vocalist Kunwar Tanishque Jarial, and more—to provide a grand musically tapestry around songwriter Arpan Kumar’s intimate narratives.
The introductory interlude “Bappi”, lays the musical groundwork for Newly Aged’s soundscapes: a slow-rising crescendo of horns and guitars and bells and brass instruments, a chaos that soon harmonizes to strike together. Kumar’s falsetto voice is heard in “I Met Someone”, where the very first lines of the album make a declaration of youthful romance and uncertainty, a simple message that unites the complexity of nearly all romantic beginnings:
I met someone last night
Who made me feel things I haven’t
Felt inside
It’s been a long time
Is it mere infatuation or the start of something big?
The thought of it all makes me fucking sick.
Then, as the drums and guitars kick in, “I Met Someone” comes alive, a throwback that holts listeners to the far past, to the psychedelic 60s sound reminiscent of late Beatles, Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, or the Beach Boys. The song also displays Green Park’s ambitions to break the rules of song progression, changing tempo mid-song, rushing forward en queue to a Kumar’s command to “rush”.
In this succinct and bittersweet half-hour, Green Park are sure to leave a strong impression on the listeners, as a young band who are headed for bigger and better things. In Newly Aged, the band allows us to feel the creak of growing pains, and a balm to soothe the way forward.
Kumar’s accent and diction, skimming over a global, fusion musical production, further places this band as something that is Indian but not quite—much like the name of the South Delhi neighbourhood that the band is inspired by. Green Park, too, suffers from a transnational identity complex, with one foot in India and one in the West.
The transnational musical influences are further boosted by Schade’s saxophone, which adds density to “I Met Someone”, plus a half-dozen other tracks in Newly Aged. “I Met Someone” is followed by one of the album’s standouts, “Coast”, a moody, swingy song which opens with Kumar crooning, “Maybe… Maybe I left my mind,” over a lovely baseline. “Coast” is waltz-inspired slow rock, almost in the vein of the The Car by the Arctic Monkeys. It’s just the kind of song that Green Park feel like they were born to perform, splashing up to listeners like soft waves hitting the toes by the beach. “Someday you will hear me as you sleep in the USA,” sings Kumar, “While it's sunny skies for me / And I’ll be where I’ve wanted to be.”
After the interlude “Yahan-Wahan”, Green Park return with the album’s zenith, “Dulcet Tones”. Featuring Schade on Saxophone, Pillai on Trumpet, Navaldi on Sarod and more, the song is another flashback to the late-60s Beatles, of the time when the Fab Four explored Indian influences in their music. In what becomes a narrative turning point in Newly Aged, Kumar sings, appropriately, in his own ‘dulcet-toned’ vocals:
It’s you that I crave but something has changed
It’s my turn to stare
But you pull away
Always afraid of feeling so great
A lovely instrumental interlude closes the track, featuring the guitars and sarod and synthesizers and percussion, all coming together in a cross-border symphony.
Things take a darker, edgier turn on the title track. “Newly Aged” is a harder, louder, rock song. Kumar’s lyrics convey an urgent feeling of insecurity, of racing against time and mortality.
You can turn the lights off
You wouldn’t wanna see my face when it's all wrinkled and burned
We’re out here dying inside
We’re out there growing old.
Many of Kumar’s lyrics in songs like “Newly Aged” and the follow-up, “Soft Toys”, often feel like they’re merely skimming the surface of potentially deeper, more complex feelings of nostalgia, pain, love, and separation. The words are small packets of easily quotable enlightenments, poetry ready for a well-designed Instagram post. In “Soft Toys”, over another jazzy, waltz backing instrumental, the lyrics hardly dive deeper into the specifics of abyss when Kumar sings, “Maybe I could be wrong / But you have awakened my heart / until the agony’s gone”.
The penultimate song, “Take What You Can Get”, ends with a similar eager directness, as Kumar sings of, “Sharing the world with those you love and the ones you don’t / Don’t bother sharpening your knives / tune your guitars instead.”
In “Take What You Can Get”, the album’s narrative settles into an acceptance. With additional vocals by Amartya Ghosh, this is a beautiful, haunting pop-rock song. It brings together the amalgamation of Green Park’s influences: a little bit Beatles, a little bit Tame Impala, a little bit Peter Cat Recording Co., a little bit Parekh & Sons. And yet, it’s something uniquely new, too. Here, Kumar and the band find resolution in art, and in an artist transforming their pain into entertainment. “Nobody's really watching you / You’re the only one there / The audience and the performer”.
Newly Aged is not a perfect project. But in this succinct and bittersweet half-hour, Green Park are sure to leave a strong impression on the listeners, as a young band who are headed for bigger and better things. In Newly Aged, the band allows us to feel the creak of growing pains, and a balm to soothe the way forward.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. His debut novel is forthcoming on the Aleph Book Company. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
