A Study in Breathing: Koyal and Their Electrifying Second Album ‘breathe in. breathe out.’
Koyal face societal pressures head on in their second studio album, breathe in. breathe out
PHOTOS BY EMILY ENTZ
I’ve always had trouble with meditation. In my room, I’ve laid out on yoga mats, squared myself on mandala pillows, prepared for what I hoped would be an absolution or at the very least, relaxation. Yet in the sudden silence, I felt nothing but the acute awareness of all that needs doing and isn’t getting done and the unbearable clarity of my own thoughts. Focus on breathing is an easy enough instruction, but it makes me restless in practice.
Listening to the latest album of Atlanta-native, newly-christened Los Angeles band, Koyal, felt a lot like meditation to me. Entitled breathe in. breathe out, this album was the program of meditation I had always hoped for and one I thoroughly comprehend. Through the groovy, psych-pop melodies, I felt a familiar restlessness in the lyrics and theatrical tension in the production; a companionable angst that was enough challenge to edify and not to discourage. Still, even with the exegesis immersed in nearly every song, there is affirmation and release.
In “Gravity,” lead vocalist, Pooja Prabakaran, addresses the push and pull of an indecisive romantic partner. The bridge is enchanting, at the fulcrum of peppy melody and conflicted emotion, “Stuck in the motions, your deep devotion / Will you carry me away, or are you running me around? A spiraling surface makes it hard to resist / Choosing a comet, an ellipse in a kiss.” The atmosphere presence of “intoxicated,” a crisp, sonic playground of sweeping synth and effervescent modalities, a feat owed to Noah Weinstein, Koyal’s guitarist and producer. Inspired by the layered whisper tracks of Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT (2024), Weinstein layered dozens of Prabakaran’s vocal tracks on the song and several others off the album, crafting inhabitable dimensions. The dancy impetus of, “lotus lake,” comes from a driving, nebulized percussion, a byproduct of Wallace, Koyal’s drummer. Each track is refreshingly airy and mellifluous, with sonic symmetry that balances catchy pop melodies with psychedelic ingenuity.
Beyond the technical elements of breathe in. breathe out, it’s immediately apparent to the listener how catharsis was carefully weaved throughout every element of the album’s creation and I felt validated by its presence. Here is an album that understands how hard it is to meditate. How hard it is to just breathe and to be. How defeated one feels at failing such basic tasks. And how pivotal it is to start again.
PHOTOS BY EMILY ENTZ
On a rainy day in L.A., it was my afternoon to speak to the members of Koyal about what went into the making of the album. Taking off my boots at the door, I admired the benign mellowness of their home. The high, slanted roof, the humble paintings of flowers along the walls. Beyond the foyer, I glimpsed the tall windows facing the grey and green topography of Los Angeles, draped in gossamer sheets of rain.
“I mean it’s always fun to write a song about a crush or whatever,” Prabakaran laughed, “and we will definitely keep doing that in the future, but for this last album, we touched on bigger things.”
The album’s thematic complexity is owed, in part, to the simultaneous metamorphoses of each member. As the story goes, the Atlanta-native band first assembled in the basement of Prabakaran’s dorm as freshmen at Georgia Tech University in 2018. And while the endeavor started out innocently, with Prabakaran singing her poetry to an accompanying piano in the comfortable confidentiality of her dorm basement, eventually the band’s crowds would swell and so would their stages. By the fall of 2023, fresh from their East Coast tour, the members of Weinstein and Wallace were settling into their last year of university and Prabakaran took a job in the tech sector. Each of them were close enough to adulthood proper, and post-grad existentialism was beginning to creep in. The charge of growing up, gainful employment at a 9-to-5, and forsaking all other creative aspirations was more than just daunting, it was eminent. And in the shadow of these rites of passage, Koyal wrote breathe in, breathe out.
“[It] all just tied in exactly to what we were going through in the time period. Because I was working a tech job and I felt really creatively stifled and I consider myself a creative,” Prabakaran explained. “Growing up, I used to write poetry and then I did playwriting and then songwriting and then I was working a tech job.[...] I was waking up dreading my day, and doing work, and then getting off of work, and just being so tired with no energy to write songs anymore. Which broke my heart. And [Wallace and Weinstein] were still in school and I think they felt pretty similarly too.”
The album, then, can be interpreted as a mosaic of the eclectic experiences of each member. Wallace wrote most of “hiatus” during spring break, feeling listless in the school year and desperate for a break from routine. The jazzy saxophone riffs, bass guitar and piano accompaniment, and relaxed pace of the song makes it one of the most sonically fluid songs from the album. The lyrical caesuras placed as little pockets of breath in the middle of lines and in between verses and choruses break up the pace of “hiatus” in the most rewarding way. Wallace also wrote the indie, bedroom pop “bummer song,” details assorted minor inconveniences to underscore the importance of friendship in overcoming hard days. The song, with harmonic leitmotifs and infectious lead guitar licks perfectly captures cultural malaise in cheeky lyrics like, “Closest bus stop is miles away / I didn’t drink water yesterday / My succulent died last week / And that sucks!”
However, my favorite track off the record is “half alive,” the harrowing final track where Prabakaran dramatizes her desultory tech job. Instrumentally, “half alive” diverges from the upbeat synth- and electronic-heavy production of the album, relying primarily on overpowering electric guitar riffs and lively percussion. The lyrics are haunting and esoteric, but with the added context of “I can feel the engine hum, head go numb ad nauseum / It’s all the same night and day, forget my name / Caught in the machine again / Stolen youth and stolen fire / Prometheus at my pyre.” The verses taper off into a nearly two-minute bridge of gritty guitar riffs, backbeats firing over stormy percussion and instrumental interpolation that echo Prabakaran’s howls of “Am I living half alive? / Am I only half alive?”
PHOTOS BY EMILY ENTZ
Wallace mused on how fitting it was that most of the songs “run parallel” in spite of their having different writers. Prabakaran calls this thematic cohesion conveyed a “throughline of needing escape and reckoning with what you’re feeling.” Still, the sentiment is permeable. The triumph of breathe in. breathe out is not its ability to confront, but in how it delivers the dialogue on such feelings. There is an impulsive levity in every song, an internal equipoise that grounds the album in reality, but not in nihilism. breathe in, breathe out is an album that avoids prescriptive solutions and moralizing equivocation, and simply places action above inertia, and passion above conformity. “Some of the topics might feel a little depressing, but there’s never a moment—except maybe in “half alive”---where you feel like you’re just at the pit of despair. There’s always hope and there’s always optimism in all the songs,” Prabakaran concluded.
Koyal speaks about their craft with a charming alacrity. They look forward to releasing the breathe in. breathe out remix album that they say will feature several EDM, indie, and other remixes, but beyond that, they look forward to their future as a band. Wallace remarked with some amusement how, unknowingly, they had put references to breathing throughout the songs, a motif I had missed in my initial listen. The irony of such a pattern is that it hints at traces of a collective memory among the members of Koyal, but perhaps, a collective experience extended to their audience.
So, I listened again and I focused on the breathing.
PHOTOS BY EMILY ENTZ
