If you’ve never caught a show at Surly Festival Field, I highly suggest you make the Young the Giant show on June 27th your first. Not only is the field beautiful and nicely run, you will get the amazing sounds of this truly timeless band.
American Bollywood, Young the Giant’s fifth studio album and first since 2018’s Mirror Master, is structured after the ancient Sanskrit Hindu text of The Mahabharata (part of the Bhagavad Gita). The band’s frontman and creative force Sameer Gadhia learned about those tales by way of the Mumbai-based Amar Chitra Katha comic books/graphic novels with their serialized depiction of religious legends, folklore and epic poems. That nexus of the ancient/classical and modern/art-pop culture is at the heart of American Bollywood’s various threads and subtexts.
Separated into four acts of four songs apiece (I. Origins, II. Exile, III. Battle, IV. Denouement), American Bollywood is a musical meditation, a song suite, a cinematic blend of modern indie-rock and ancient Indian instrumentation, including sitar and tablas (Gadhia’s father played the latter, while his grandmother was a professional singer). The album recounts the true-life journey of Young the Giant’s frontman Sameer Gadhia’s parents, who emigrated in 1984 from India to America, where he was born, tracing his own internal struggle to preserve a cultural identity while assimilating into the melting pot of Southern California’s Orange County.
Co-produced by John Hill [Santigold, M.I.A., Phantogram, Khalid] with the band, the album represents the perfect storm in Young the Giant’s professional and personal lives – the isolation brought on by Covid, starting families of their own and breaking away from the major label system with their own label, Jungle Youth Records through AWAL. And while the narrative follows the particular journey of Gadhia’s family, the songs are expansive enough to apply to anyone who has relocated from their homeland to another country. Every last one of us in America is an immigrant or descended from one.
Opening up this show will be both Milky Chance and TALK so make sure to get there early!
Tickets are still available HERE!
