Are we entering a new period of electronic music excellence in Malaysia? From the looks of it, yes. In fact, it’s long overdue for a new genre to snatch the crown from indie rockers and dominate the scene, whatever is left of it. This decade in particular, the underdogs are shaping their expression through glitchy, sparkling electronic music, unashamed of experimenting with sounds that let clicks and cursor drags do the talking. From the aching music of retired odd-one-out pioneer Lurkgurl (sigh), to raver kids Astral Angels, to hyperpop stars like ira4ma and Killamisha, we are entering an era where the focus has shifted away from the slacker rockers on stage and toward the troublemaker and the wallflower (sometimes both) in front of the MIDI controller. Surely there’s more to look forward to, right?
Enter Penang musician Anusha Jean Ramesh’s debut album Us as Brothers, a 27-minute collection of spellbinding yet vulnerably personal indietronica that moulds an ethereal realm you wish to be stuck in, even if it’s far from comfortable; cold, damp, the morning dew drops onto your skin. That’s the most potent feeling the album evokes, and it lingers for the entire duration. Across eight tracks, the narrator flirts with an almost-romantic partner while also offering an ode to a lasting friendship. Those two sides of love are the basic principles of Us as Brothers, and the title hints at you which one is trying to win. It’s also about holding your hands out but scared to ever reach the person, while knowing there are other kinds of love to guide you through it. How can a suffocating idea feel this airy and tranquil?
Take the fourth track, “Buck Angel’s Castle,” for example, a clear album highlight. Over bouncy chiptune melodies and hushed electronic drum taps, the song opens with Anusha cooing, “I wanna tell you something / that I can’t let go.” It carries the weight of cryptic confessions right from the start, already imagining the consequences of opening up before the first words are even uttered. Their vocals, already sweet like an indie pop songstress’s, eventually free-fall into the echoey, sensitive chorus, easily the best moment on the album: “If I, let it all go / What’s happening to me?” The track begins with a clear problem but never offers a weighty solution; it only circles back to the same anxiety. Paired with Anusha’s dreamy vocals, which are usually distracted by the cynical glitches and samples heard on other tracks, the emotional weight settles heavily on the yearning it wants to stay with.
Us as Brothers is far from Anusha’s first attempt at music. The 25-year-old musician has two other projects, I Love Girl and tang, both actively releasing new music this year, though they’re based in Barcelona. The former, a project with Maria Emilia Barreiro, released the album The Sound of Two Swords back in July. tang, formerly known as Bimarmoya, is a sonic-visual project with Chloe Cekada. Both projects are anxious in their sounds, falling into the trap of maxing out flickering ambient beats but leaving you to connect the dots on your own. For their solo project, and the first based in Malaysia, Anusha strips away that pressure and instead turns up the volume on emotional vulnerability. The third track “I Could Meet You Anywhere” opens with Anusha whispering their confusion as if awakened after the deepest sleep, all while a barking robotic dog, a revving motorcycle engine, flickers of video game samples (“Level 1, Level 2, Level 3”) and uncanny, synthetic text-to-speech vocals threatening to chew someone’s neck clash and build up into a confession: “I just can’t help falling in the middle of June.” It’s almost like a mental tug of war over how a feeling, no matter how innocent in its intention, could spring out of nowhere. With stuttering beats throughout, the feeling finally settles on a resolution: “I will meet you anywhere / I see you in dreams.” What is having a crush on someone without feeling hit by a red brick of disbelief, followed much later by the slow acceptance?
The sound of Us as Brothers may be likened to the surge of indietronica we’re seeing on front music pages like Ninaprotocol (RIP?): a little bit of james k here, a little bit of Quiet Light there. But these roads fascinatingly lead to the same place, which is where Anusha also excels: collaging a patchwork of sounds built around a bluish atmosphere and flashes of hyperpersonal street samples, with small one-liners anchoring the emotion. In the lead single and album opener “Axel Stone,” the narrator’s sensuality meets anxiety the moment they first lay eyes on someone, loosened by hazy basslines. “It’s confusing / How many times I had / One drink and a dream to make it all again,” Anusha sings. A lot of the references in the samples also seem to make sense only to the narrator, like the robotic voice that stutters through a count from one to four in Mandarin, or the track’s name, borrowed from a Streets of Rage character. The samples chirp around your head, almost distracting though the message never gets lost in the fragmentation. Before they have the chance to turn muddy, an anchor line dives in: “I like the rain in the winters delay in the pool / Where I swim that makes me think of you.” If there’s one thing that’s consistent, besides the sharp sword imagery (in the single’s cover art and the sampled sound of it parting the air), it’s the self-aware production taking hold too.
But it’d also be a disservice to say Us as Brothers’ strength comes purely from its moody, dreamlike indietronica when its pop sensibilities flash their songwriting chops in green as they go. You could imagine the album playing on the white runway floors of KL Fashion Week or at an underground rave (among Anusha’s first performances were at Ng Fook Thong Temple in Penang), but it isn’t confined to either. Nothing proves it like “Triple X,” the album’s most pop moment. The breakcore track starts out relentless, its narrator surrendering themself to someone else’s needs. The beats climb step by step before stomping on the brakes as the soap bubble pops. As if Anusha themselves were weary of the cycle, it breaks into its best pop bit: “I get all I need / When I wake up next to you.” It carries so much wholeness from the simple gesture of sleeping next to each other. When repeated, the chaos built earlier blurs into shadows.
The presence of spiritual awakening is all over the album too. God makes an appearance a few times, but whether God is the lover or the higher power that gives the strength to forget the lover is unclear, and it doesn’t really matter. Neither is the main character. On “Snowthug,” the narrator finds God’s imprints all over, in “crossed stars and a sinking clover” and “tethered ex-believers on the rocks.” This is early in the album, when unrequited love still pricks like pins in the chest, and the narrator can only pray to get the person off their mind. The final track, “Pretty Force Blue Wind,” also the longest on the album, doesn’t resolve the ache so much as learn to carry it. The atmospheric, end-credits-ish track starts quietly with a sorrowful, muffled voice recalling a memory, thunder clapping in the background and all. The constellation of beats then slowly scatters before converging into a luminous credo: “If god leaves an emblem on my cheek / They also leave a gold star for me,” Anusha sings, making way for the track to transition into a pulsating dance number. Then comes the admission: “I say I can make it without you, and I, hold my lie,” which later flips to “wanna lie.” Whether God or a crush left the imprint, the one carrying it, and lying about it, is the narrator. The touch intended may never come, but it doesn’t need to. It was never about them, and Us as Brothers is better for it.