Band:	Bloodywood
Album:	Nu Delhi
Style:	Alternative metal, Folk metal
Release date:	March 21, 2025
A review by:	corrupt

01. Halla Bol
02. Hutt
03. Dhadak
04. Bekhauf [ft. Babymetal]
05. Kismat
06. Daggebaaz
07. Tadka
08. Nu Delhi

A reduced version of a band's sound on a shorter release, emphasizing certain aspects of it, is often called an EP. Let’s figure out why this is, instead, an album, and whether that was a good decision.

Bloodywood have come a pretty long way for a band that has officially existed for only eight years. What started as a fun project of two friends recording metal cover versions of pop songs, slowly starting to write their own material, led to the release of the phenomenal Rakshak in 2022 and now their new record, Nu Delhi.

Rakshak was a spectacular release that immediately established Bloodywood's place in the international nu metal scene. Their Punjabi-infused sound was a welcome, rejuvenating change for a style that hadn’t seen much innovation since the late ‘90s, and had its patterns and structures fully established.

Bloodywood didn't try to re-invent the style. Rakshak's music is straightforward 4/4, 16-bar nu-metal with a heavy drop-tuned 7-string sound, borrowing from other styles like djent at times, combined with the familiar interplay of rap and extreme vocals. Where it did set a new standard was in its cultural sound; the band firmly established the dhol as an instrument, playing mostly bhangra rhythms on the percussion layer, and used a tumbi for some of their melodies. This gave their music a distinct Punjabi sound, drawing from the band’s own musical and cultural roots, covering (among other music) Indian pop songs like Daler Mehndi’s ‘90s hit "Tunak Tunak Tun". The band went out of their way to combine these elements into satisfying progressions, further adding flutes, lo-fi sound, breaks, and their signature combination of clean and harsh vocals and Raoul Kerr’s message-laden rap.

Rakshak's sound felt fresh and invigorating, with surprisingly clean and intricate production for a relatively small band's debut. It's a strong testament to the musical prowess of the trio and their support musicians, and displays great musical vision and writing talent. One criticism that was often heard is that it sounds more like a collection of singles than a cohesive body of work, to which I partly agree. Its nearly 50-minute runtime leaves enough room to breathe between 10 songs, with beautiful ballads and quieter, more contemplative song parts, but it does have that "every song is a single" feeling, with many songs developing a very distinct musical identity. It is by no means a difficult listen (we are talking about nu metal after all), but one where I often find myself going straight to a few songs rather than listening to the whole album.

Almost exactly three years later, Bloodywood return with their sophomore release, Nu Delhi. I said in the intro that this could have been an EP, and I'll explain what I mean.

Nu Delhi leaves behind a lot of what fans might have expected from a follow-up to Rakshak. It retains the familiar phrasing and progression, with something new happening in almost every phrase, and it still mostly features a bhangra layer. But these new songs wrap their elements in a different mix that puts more emphasis on guitars and drums than on percussion or vocals and relies heavily on digital effects, giving most of the songs a very inorganic feel. This is taken to an unfortunate extreme in "Bekhauf", where all support instruments are dropped and replaced by a Babymetal feature in what I consider to be the weakest song on the album for exactly this reason. This approach does address the "every song is a single" feel, but it does so by stripping away a lot of what made Rakshak such a special release and Bloodywood such an impactful band.

Having said that, it is still the vocals that I struggle with the most. I usually like it when vocals feel like an equal part of the mix as opposed to taking center stage, but Bloodywood were a notable exception. Rakshak struck a great balance between emphasizing the vocals and giving room to the music, which I really enjoyed. Nu Delhi, on the other hand, sounds like a compressed version of that approach, heavily emphasizing guitars over everything else, including vocals, and sacrificing a significant aspect of Bloodywood's sonic identity on Rakshak.

Lacking this identity, much of Nu Delhi sounds very similar, which is only exacerbated by the complete lack of a breather track, or even an extended intro to give the listener some orientation. Nu Delhi's tracks all have a very identical intensity with little dynamic or dramatic range, almost as if they were all written, recorded, and produced in one session with too little time to pay attention to the mix.

When I say that this could have been an EP, I mean a release where a band develops certain aspects of their sound, resulting in a record that is shorter in length than a full-length studio effort (though EP runtimes in excess of 30 minutes are not unheard of) and sounds a little different. All of this is true of Nu Delhi. While its 33-minute running time feels more than adequate for a release with that little breathing room, it is significantly shorter than Rakshak's 48, and it achieves this reduction by extremely streamlining the sound and avoiding any quieter parts, be it an interlude, an intro, a bridge, or an entire ballad.

Sometimes, this EP approach works wonders and helps bands evolve their overall style, but in the case of Nu Delhi, I can't help but feel that its writing and production were rushed. It sounds more like the mass-produced version of the handcrafted piece that was Rakshak, lacking the fine details and the personality, but being potentially more accessible.

The result is undoubtedly powerful, the band still know what they're doing, the delivery is tight, Jayant's vocals still steal the show, and I can attest to the fact that these songs work really well in a live setting. But when I just compare Nu Delhi's opener "Halla Bol", with all its full force till the end, to Rakshak's "Gaddaar", a whole song built around one of Nana Patekar's most famous movie quotes, which is used for great effect in the intro and brought back in excerpts in the bridge for a quieter interlude, I can't help but miss an essential part of my personal Bloodywood experience.

This continues throughout the full runtime of the album. Most songs are centered around one or two riffs, whereas Rakshak features more variety; every song has a version of the same intro and the same break at roughly the same point. This over-reliance on one template only adds to the overall cookie-cutter feel - the mass-production effect I mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately, this reduction of elements also applies to the lyrics. Where Rakshak drew from a wide range of lyrical themes such as political corruption, sexual abuse, bullying, loss of a loved one (or pet), and personal growth, most of Nu Delhi's songs deal with a central but abstract theme of inner strength vs. oppression (albeit in forms such as fighting for the inner child, or overcoming big-tech exploitation). The exceptions are "Nu Delhi" and "Tadka", hymns to the eponymous city and the central-Asian food culture of tempering - "Tadka" (तड़का) being one of its Hindi translations.

Some people say that each release of a band should be treated in isolation and not compared to the rest of the catalog. If you do that, Nu Delhi is a very solid release that won't knock your socks off, but won't bore you either. The new songs are easily accessible and well-produced, and they work well in a live setting. If you like your nu metal to be straightforward and explosive, you'll find a lot of Nu Delhi to be very enjoyable. Probably even people who didn't enjoy the Indian identity of Rakshak's music will find a lot more to like here.

I obviously don't subscribe to the no-context approach to reviewing, and Rakshak was such a bombastic release that I never really expected Bloodywood to fully be able to live up to it; sometimes a band's first release sets the bar too high, and this is one of those times. Still, I can't help but be a little disappointed with the direction they ended up taking, and I hope that this remains a one-off experiment. I hope this is actually an EP (accidentally released as a full-length) to explore a certain aspect of Bloodywood's sound, and that the band will return to the more organic, more diverse, more dramatic, and more thematic style of songwriting they left such a lasting impression with in 2022.

In the meantime I will say that Nu Delhi is enough to give me a little bit of a Bloodywood fix, but even as I write this, I find myself wanting to listen to Rakshak again.