Over the past 14 years, Indian indie-rock veterans Peter Cat Recording Co. have perfected their own particular style of fusion. They travel across time and geography, plundering sounds and aesthetics—early-20th-century cabaret, 1950s vocal jazz, 1960s soul, 1970s Bollywood, and early-2000s indie rock—and assembling these transcultural artifacts into improbable collages, warping their references’ familiarity into something more subversive, and occasionally a little sinister.
They follow that blueprint to excellent effect on “People Never Change,” the lead single off their latest album, BETA. The dholak and iktara that kick things off suggest the sort of earthy Punjabi folk pop that is inescapable at North Indian weddings, then feint left by adding sub-aquatic bass synth and jazz saxophone. The song constantly mutates, weaving a dizzying, six-and-a-half-minute path through funk, disco, bossa nova, and psychedelia. But though they borrow heavily from previous eras, PCRC are driven by the urge to move forward, rousing the ghosts of the past to interrogate the fault lines of the present, both personal and political.
Such creative restlessness has always been central to the PCRC ethos, especially in the years they spent gestating in the Indian rock underground. Their catalog is full of abrupt left turns: from cinematic cabaret-punk to surrealistic soundscapes of noise and found sound, from psychedelic slow waltzes to mutant amalgamations of guitar drone and James Chance-esque trumpet. The only constants have been a seemingly limitless capacity for surprising their fans and frontman Suryakant Sawhney’s seductive 1950s croon, marinated in subtle, self-aware melancholy.
BETA—which means “son” in Hindi, a reference to drummer Karan Singh recently becoming a father—builds on the dizzying stylistic shifts and artful studio trickery of their 2019 breakthrough Bismallah, smashing disparate sounds, eras, and cultural traditions together to create entirely new sound worlds, each composition an exercise in alternate history and speculative fiction. The chromatic synths and distorted bass pulses of “21c” conjure up a ballroom from the 2050s, marrying old-world grace with space-age synths. “Black and White” opens with an MBV-esque wall of guitar noise that gives way to a propulsive funk groove and blown-out bass synths as the song mutates from shoegaze freakout to the bastard love child of bossa nova, disco, and rave.
Elsewhere, PCRC move their sound further into the sunlight, dabbling in subtropical psychedelia and the bucolic wistfulness of early-2000s indie folk. On opener “Flowers R. Blooming,” ghungroo, swarsangam, clarinet, and acoustic guitar coalesce into a shimmering wash of sound, invoking the pastoral beauty of the North Indian heartland. “I Deny Me”—a rousing ballad about the redemptive power of music, written and sung by bassist Dhruv Bhola—sounds like it would fit seamlessly into the Garden State soundtrack, all soulful warble and earnest finger-plucked guitar.
