Critically acclaimed, multi-platinum band Young the Giant releases the music video for “My Way” from ACT II: EXILE the second act of their fifth studio album, American Bollywood, which will be released on October 21 via AWAL/Jungle Youth Records.
American Bollywood will be the first album in four years since Mirror Master and the first since leaving the major label system. Since the last album, three of the band members became fathers, and of course, there was a global pandemic. The album tells the multi-generational saga of the American immigrant and the origins, exiles, battles, and denouement of reclaiming our collective identity. The band’s singer, Sameer Gadhia, is the son of Indian immigrants, making him a unique voice in American rock music.
Gadhia said this about ACT II: EXILE:
Sometimes exile is external pressure to leave. In the Mahabharata [one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India], the Pandavas are banished from their kingdom after a rigged game of dice.
For the world, our pandemic exile has been a new reality we are still reeling from. We wonder if things will ever go back: if we can unsee what we were forced to in the mirror of isolation.
But for the immigrant, exile is a voluntary sacrifice for opportunity: the loss of homeland is a pining that is always there, even subconsciously in the children of immigrants, whose parents loss is just a formless ghost that causes trauma rippling across generations.
The album was co-produced by John Hill (Santigold, M.I.A, Phantogram, Khalid) and the members of Young the Giant, the album’s lead single “Wake Up”, released in June, is currently in the top 30 on Alternative Radio.