Rounak Maiti’s Confrontation with Home, the World, and the Self
Rounak Maiti. Photo: Annette Jacob
In Brute Face/Home Truth (2025), Rounak Maiti presents a personal, cathartic album, with a dizzying soundscape that remains unbound by the constructs of genre.
In a small, darkened conference-style room on the topmost floor of Mary Lodge by Subko in Bandra—aptly named ‘The Last Supper Room’—is a long table, and at its farthest corner sits singer-songwriter-producer Rounak Maiti. Armed with a laptop, a projector, and a white screen, while surrounded by friends, collaborators, and persons of interest, he helms a listening session of his first album in six years: Brute Fact/Home Truth. The notes escape the speakers and fill up the crevices of the browned walls and empty spaces, Maiti briefly interjects from time to time, explaining the history or the mechanics of the procedure that led up to the tracks in question. Otherwise, he nods along to the beats—a little more in sync than his enthusiastic, loving listeners.
The 10-track, near 38-minutes long album opens like a metal trunk of memorabilia, with a soundscape so dizzying you almost find yourself overwhelmed by the influx of synths, wall-of-sound guitars, noisy samples, electric leads, and propulsive rhythms. Brute Fact/Home Truth was written over a period of five-to-six years, soon after his last release, Waiting on the Comedown (2019). Maiti’s latest takes several steps further away from Waiting: His work is more located in a sensibility of being unbound by the constructs of genre, which he had conformed to slightly more in his previous bedroom-pop and country releases. The arrangements of the tracks remind me of bumper cars at amusement parks that are meant to go awry, encircling and crashing against each other—inevitably damaging, and yet so full of intrigue that you cannot, physically, distract yourself from them.
The record begins with “Scary Season,” which quite literally takes sonic derivatives of the spook-scape, enmeshing them with windchime like tinkling and builds them into an instrumental with heavy, hollow synths, before the artist sings in a voice that goes from full-bodied to dissembling. For the most part, it almost seems like Maiti is negotiating the space between being frightening and being afraid. Menacingly, he sings:
Ghostly bodies
Move so quiet
Skin so charred with
Stares so blinding
Round my house I
Heard some silence
Hold my voice when
It gets violent
There is an immediate change of pace in the second track, as Maiti raps on “Self-Discipline,” almost pummeling the beat down, something one would be familiar with if they have heard him on any of his projects with the band Excise Dept. It is impressive how the ethos of each track translates Maiti’s production, even beyond the lyricism. In “Self-Discipline” he chants, almost maniacally,
On Brute Fact/Home Truth, Maiti refuses to hide the knife, leaving the brutality out in the open. Much of this record has him tracing the bricolage of his home, while ironically, also shoveling tunnelways leading further away.
What I need
What I need
Is so far out of reach for me
What I need
What I need
Is not for you to give to me
before he reconciles his history of expertise in lush dreampop sequences, combining his atmospheric sound-making with the grit of his self-discipline, blazing through it all like a coping mechanism.
On his press-release, the album is described to be “a searing critique of the self; a deeply personal form of catharsis that has been long overdue; a deeper inquiry into his many ‘home truths’––things, especially those that are unpleasant, that are known to be true and cannot be ignored; and ‘brute facts’—facts that cannot be explained in terms of a deeper, more fundamental fact. As it might be put, there may exist some things that just are.” Maiti has always been brutal in his interrogation of his selfhood, even in his throes of inculcating strands of ethereal wave into his body of work, or as in this case, welding shoegaze into the design of his sound. On Brute Fact/Home Truth, he refuses to hide the knife, leaving the brutality out in the open. Much of this record has him tracing the bricolage of his home, while ironically, also shoveling tunnelways leading further away.
One of my favorite songs from this album is “Self-Medicate,” the lead single featuring Shantanu Pandit, on which Maiti showcases his garage-pop sensibilities. The visualizer for this track, made by Saba Mundlay, has the lyrics float around amoebically, as old bent photographs appear in flashes. The song is almost a play on childhood angst, befitting the production, complicated by the knowledge of what everything meant now that time has passed. At the listening session, Maiti admits that the song is about doing drugs, as promised by the tell-all title. Pandit’s verse on this adds a kind of saccharine, bubble-gum taste, cementing that sense of mischievous, grunge-y, basement-duo made music. He sings:
Yeah she’s my super-secret best friend
Lie about her to my parents
Very undercover, tell her that I love her
Throw her in the gutter
Wait till after sunset
When it's all black and blue
Realizing sacrifice is terrifying
Just to get it off my chest
Cleaning up this mess
Until there’s nothing left to give or left to lose
Nothing to live for
Much of the album is also situated in the trials and tribulations of forming identity—both spatial and emotional. Maiti had moved to the US for his undergraduate study, and it had changed things for him foundationally. He splits open the promise and paranoia of the land in question on “Blinding Light America.” Accompanied by David de Menezes on violin, he is mournful and bitter, cursing the isolation and the disillusionment, as he bestows the country with epithets that are critical incisions, such as “gift of sight and sound America,” “everlasting road America,” and finally, makes an acknowledgement that weighs heavy, the double edged sword that impales migration of any sort with the words: “The debt I’ll always owe America.”
There is something distinctly Bengali about this song, and the record at large, although not present as tangible evidence. An English teacher of mine often used to say, “Half of being Bengali is between the home and the world.” Perhaps, this applies to the way Maiti makes his music, as he digs through memories, sits in the viscerality of being home, and the ever-elusive nature of leaving it.
The greatest strength of this album is the sheer impossibility of boiling it down, condensing it, reducing it to a singular precipitate. Very rarely does one come across work that has such personhood to itself—and Brute Fact/Home Truth is quite distinctly a body of work that behaves like a living organism, that has a will of its own. Maiti is gentle and angry and quiet and cruel, as he swings between softly crooning on his folktronica number “Learnt My Lesson” with Karshni singing “I can’t be dreaming this is not how I planned it in my head / These words they just feel stupid and I’ve had it with myself in the end / Run it back I wanna see my life play back in double time.”
In the darkened room in Bandra, the artist tells us that he kept making the album till he could not, tinkering away at the tracks, adding layers until he finally uploaded the songs onto Distrokid. This labour is not invisible: one hears it in the voice-notes, in the sampling, in the choice of percussion placements. In everything.
There are times when music can leave you wondering where it has been all your life, because now it seems so intrinsic, inextricable in its presence. This is, inarguably, one of those times.
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Saptaparna Samajdar is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai, India. She primarily covers music and urban politics. You can find her on Instagram @saptaparnasamajdar and X: @opaarparna.
