In 2017, Rounak Maiti opened his debut, Bengali Cowboy, with a note of cautious optimism: “In time, this I know, they’ll learn to love me.” Seven years and a few existential crises later, that optimism has all but disappeared. Brute Fact/Home Truth, his third full-length, is a self-eviscerating spiral of a record, formed out of trauma, self-doubt, and the sort of bruising truths that rattle around your head long after the lights have gone out. Rendered in dense, echo-washed soundscapes, this is an album about watching yourself fall apart, and finding some sort of grace in the unravelling.
Written and recorded “through periods of severe isolation, disillusionment, and burnout”—during which Maiti changed countries, cities, and jobs, and left his label—Brute Fact/Home Truth rarely opts for a linear narrative. Maiti’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics are like disjointed fragments of conversation and memory plucked from the infinite scroll of a brain stuck in overdrive. As if that interior disarray bled into the music, this is also Maiti’s most rangey record yet—a genre-agnostic bricolage of wall-of-sound guitars, bubbling synth-pop, bit-blasted percussion, and dreamy ambience.
What Maiti calls his “brute facts” and “home truths” are those foundational emotional patterns and personal failings that resist explanation, let alone resolution. He finds release in picking at these scabs, counting his emotional wounds with a perverse glee. “2x Playback Speed” drapes post-Britpop guitars over hangdog-loser lyricism (“You don’t wanna be on my side/Disappointment’s walking down the timeline”), delivered in a reverb-drenched croon that sounds like Julian Casablancas channeling Morrissey. “Phantom Vibration Syndrome” soundtracks the rituals of post-traumatic hypervigilance—“Check my phone/Leave the lights on/Breathe in and out”—with arena-sized emo rock, layering delay-heavy guitar leads over towering riffs and thunderous drums.
Any hope for redemption is quickly ushered offstage. “Healing, it isn’t what it’s made out to be/It kinda makes me freak,” he sings on the Shantanu Pandit collab “Self-Medicate,” a song about hedonism as a coping mechanism that sounds like something Car Seat Headrest might write after a weekend overdosing on ’80s synth-pop. On “Learnt My Lesson,” a standout collaboration with singer-songwriter Karshni, country-fried folktronica provides the backdrop for candid reflections on creative disenfranchisement delivered in spectral harmony. As the track builds to a coda of arpeggiated synths and sandblasted drums, Maiti asks, “What now?” on repeat—so emotionally spent that misery starts to sound like release.
On “Blinding Light America,” Maiti looks outward for once, mapping his complicated relationship with the United States, the country where he was born and where he returned for his undergraduate studies. His voice sounds raw and sepulchral, channeling some of the same grief and rage that animated Anjimile’s 2023 album The King. “All I wanna do is stay/All I wanna do is go,” he sings, caught between the promise of the American dream and a sense of alienation from its current reality.
