The Mumbai collective slow down, switch off the metronome and dig into partition memory for a second album that refuses the playlist era.

Rating: 4/5

Excise Dept made their name being loud and funny. Their 2024 debut, SAB KUCH MIL GAYA MUJHE VOL 1, was sample-heavy hip-hop dressed in safari suits — what Vogue India called "internet-fried surrealism" — and it carried the Mumbai collective from art galleries to Lollapalooza India. SHOPNOBHUMI, their second album and first for London's Dialled In Records, is something stranger and braver: a record about home, memory and partition that sounds like it was found rather than made.

Recorded without a grid

The method shapes everything. Karanjit Singh, Andrew Sabu, Rounak Maiti and Siddhant Vetekar spent 2025, in their words, slowing down to "recalibrate" the habits they had fallen into. They set up stations in their home studio and moved between them freely, working with electronic artist Sanjay Das (Philtersoup). "Every song was heavily improvised," they told DESIblitz, "and most of the tracks are a fully live recording without any metronome or grid." Sessions ran from Navi Mumbai to Island City Studios to Abbey Road.

You can hear the room. Tape hiss, strings, drum machines and voices bleed into one another. The ten tracks run 52 minutes; "J.C.R" alone takes ten and a half.

Rivers, rain and borders

The source material is personal. Partition-era stories, patriotic songs and the oral histories the members grew up with are filtered through Punjabi and Bengali storytelling. Rivers, roads, rain and dreams keep returning. Opener "NEEND" sets the tone with blistering synths and a narrator who cannot recognise his own photograph in an "iron city" of people "made of brass".

The album notes compare the whole thing to the Voyager Golden Record — "a lost multilingual transmission drifting in the endless void." It is a grand claim. It mostly holds up. The credits open with a dedication to grandparents and family members, which tells you where the record's weight comes from.

The verdict

SHOPNOBHUMI is not built for the skip button and does not pretend otherwise. Some long passages drift. But as a statement from one of the most closely watched acts in South Asia, it is bold: a band choosing depth over the formula that made them.

Start with: "NEEND", "SHOPNO MORE NA", "KAR MILONO CHAU".

Listen

Stream SHOPNOBHUMI on Bandcamp or Apple Music.

FAQ

When was Excise Dept's SHOPNOBHUMI released?

9 October 2026, via London's Dialled In Records.

What does SHOPNOBHUMI mean?

It means "Dreamland" in Bengali.

Who produced the album?

It was written, recorded and produced by Excise Dept with Sanjay Das (Philtersoup), who also mixed it. Stefan Betke mastered it at Scape Mastering in Berlin.