In the four and a half years it’s taken for Parvaaz to release their second album, Kun, a lot has changed—personally and professionally—for the Bangalore rock quartet. “It was 2014 when Baran was released. We’re in 2019 and our standards of living have changed, our ideas have changed,” vocalist and guitarist Khalid Ahamed tells Apple Music. As the band grows as human beings, they’ve drawn their thematic preoccupations for music from life. Guitarist Mir Kashif Iqbal says, “I think it’s about general existential crises, which anybody can have in these times that we’re living in. Of course, it’s open to interpretation.” Recorded and pored over for about two years, Kun showcases Parvaaz as some of rock music’s most sublime, breathtaking storytellers. Still rooted in their heady concoction of psychedelic rock, blues and poetry, the band speak on the key elements that shaped the record. Internal Indulgence Metre “We consciously cut down our times in jams. Once we have a basic structure of a song, it could be a 10-minute jam also. It mostly is. It’s only after we start adding some melodies and hooks, then we kind of shorten it and rearrange it a little bit. I think we were consciously trying to cut it to seven or eight songs on this album,” Iqbal says. Ahamed adds, “There’s a song [“Mushq-e-Gul”] that is the shortest song on the album. It’s about two minutes and forty seconds. You might see people telling us, ‘Oh, why is this song so short? You could’ve sung another verse.’ We didn’t feel like that.” Lyrical Openness Ahamed says the Hindi, Kashmiri and Urdu lyrics have never been about giving a direct message, since that would put them “into a box”. The band avoided “generic words” in Hindi or Urdu. Iqbal adds, “If you’re making music that will move people, you better write words that sound good and heavy, in a way. Within the songs, there are conversations. It could be between you and yourself or someone else, or someone addressing a whole crowd or one person. It’s a lot of back and forth.” Connective Tissues The nine-track album is woven together by samples of birds [“Mastaan”], a Chinese string instrument called erhu [“Kun”] and Parvaaz’s own songwriting prowess [“Shabaan” closes hair-raisingly to make way for the opening riff to “Zindaano”]. Drummer Sachin Banandur likens listening to Kun to watching an entire TV series. “This isn’t like Friends. You have to watch the first episode to know what’s happening later.” Bassist Fidel D’Souza mentions listening patterns in the present day and says it might prove to be a challenge that the band are willing to take on. “I’m looking forward to seeing if people are still interested in the record as a whole.”