As Young The Giant head out on tour this summer, fans are seeing a band that has made their most ambitious and complex work to date in the album “American Bollywood.”
Written primarily by singer Sameer Gadhia, whose parents moved from India to the United States in 1984 shortly before he was born, “American Bollywood” tells a multi-layered, multi-generational story of the journey to reconcile the very different cultures of an immigrant’s Indian heritage and his new home in America and reach a place where he feels he belongs and is centered within his own unique background and experiences.
Credit: Natasha Wilson
Credit: Natasha Wilson
As the band’s bio for “American Bollywood” describes it, the album is divided into four acts. The first represents Gadhia’s “grandparents in the old world (”Origins”), his parents finding themselves strangers in a new world (“Exile”), his fight to maintain his culture while also trying to fit in (“Battle”) and finally, reconciliation and transcendence for future generations (“Denouement”).”
Gadhia said the idea behind the “American Bollywood” story had been percolating in his thoughts for some time, but it was during the pandemic — when Young The Giant couldn’t tour and there was time to think and create — that both a musical and lyrical structure for the album came into focus.
“I think in part, it was a story I had been always around and I just didn’t really know how to best tell it sonically and live in it,” Gadhia explained in a mid-May phone interview. “I think it was the self-titled song, ‘American Bollywood,’ that really opened the floodgates for me. I was trying to find a way to like meld things sonically that didn’t feel overly like fusion or anything and felt contemporary on either side of the coin of Eastern traditional and Western pop music. And I’d been wanting to tell the story of how I got here.”
“American Bollywood” stands as an impressive achievement for a band that started out with seemingly modest intentions. Originally formed in 2004 under the band name the Jakes (which was spelled from the first-name initials of the five original band members) while the band members were still in high school, their first music and image was light-hearted and even jokey at times.
Credit: Katie Darby/Invision/AP
Credit: Katie Darby/Invision/AP
The Jakes evolved into Young The Giant in 2009 after a shift in the lineup rendered the Jakes name inapplicable. The revamped lineup of Gadhia, guitarists Eric Cannata and Jacob Tilley, drummer Francois Comtois and bassist Payam Doostzadeh got signed by Roadrunner Records that year and in 2010 emerged with the “Young The Giant” album and an expansive guitar pop/rock sound.
By the time the debut album finished its run, it had established Young The Giant as a band to watch and yielded a pair of top-five alternative rock hits in “My Body” and “Cough Syrup.” The band members then began to broaden their sound on the 2014 album, “Mind Over Matter,” working synthesizers and other new textures into their guitar-centered sound. The sophomore outing included a top-five alt-rock single, “It’s About Time,” while the title track peaked at No. 15.
Credit: Katie Darby/Invision/AP
Credit: Katie Darby/Invision/AP
The band’s next two albums each produced an additional top 10 alt-rock single — “Something To Believe In” from 2016′s “Home of the Strange” and “Superposition” from 2018′s “Mirror Master” — while adding new dimensions to Young The Giant’s sound and broaching a few of the immigrant themes that are now explored with depth and grace on “American Bollywood.”
The new album not only represents a lyrical triumph, it takes Young The Giant’s music to a new level as well. Especially over the first half of “American Bollywood,” the band members find ways to cohesively weave Eastern instrumental sounds into several of the songs. (Gadhia’s father even plays tablas on the album.) This blend is especially effective on songs like the hooky rocker “Wake Up,” which takes on a mystical musical quality with its droning tones, and “Insomnia,” whose dreamy effect is enhanced by the blended instrumentation. The Indian elements, though, don’t diminish the band’s established sound. “American Bollywood” is still an album of accessible, frequently epic pop-rock.
Young The Giant are touring for much of the remainder of 2023. Gadhia noted that some older songs that fit thematically are being woven into the set list alongside the “American Bollywood” material. The visual presentation figures to match the scale of the album and help enhance the narrative of the new songs.
Credit: Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP
Credit: Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP
“We wanted this to feel like you’re out to see a play,” Gadhia said, noting the band is picking their spots to use the video screens that are so common at concerts. “We will have moments, because there is a strong filmic element to ‘American Bollywood.’ We kind of made a contiguous short song list of all of the videos we created. We’re working to re-edit those a little bit and tell this act structure. So we will have these moments of video, where people can kind of take themselves out for a second in a way. But we do want people to just kind of see what’s happening on stage. I can’t give all of it away, but I’m just really excited for all of it.”
CONCERT PREVIEW
Young the Giant with Milky Chance
7 p.m. July 13. $32-$72. Cadence Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain Park, 4469 Stella Drive NW, Atlanta. livenation.com.
