<h1 class="left">The F16’s new album; All Dogs Go To Heaven, sounds like meeting a stranger who feels like an old friend. There’s grooves and rhythms struck up conversationally that dictate how you feel about a person. The line between familiar and exciting must always be toed, never overdone. The fun-loving indie-trope troop took some time off, and returned with their most matured, easygoing record yet. The self-attested ease at which all of this album’s elements came together is really apparent throughout, not for a lack of effort, but for a serious commitment to relaxation. ‘Slacker rock’ never felt so accomplished.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">The psychedelic-pop-rock-and-roll-and-other-keywords outfit has united both the uncles and the youngcles, basking under the sheer sunshine of shimmery guitars, millennial-optimism drums and airy vocals. Their music exudes such shameless joy. Was this set of 4 men born at the cosmically well-timed junction just before despair? Are the characters just as stonefully blissed as their music? The band name is a euphemism for the physical act of sharing the green stuff (also referred to as ‘taxiing’). Their dealer should be credited as a co-writer at this point. They write and sing in English because it’s what they were raised with. “It’s hard to be a cynic when everyone’s urbane” sings Joshua Fernandez on 2019’s Sucks To Be Human right before a funky little guitar solo. I had to look up what "urbane” meant, and it means what they mean it to mean.</h1>

<h1 class="right">Giving their Apple Music Essentials playlist a front-to-back spin gives you a pretty solid idea of what the band does. This is no-bullshit rock. As glimmery and warm as they are, The F16s are formalists. I love The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem as much as the next guy, but why these bands are cited as their biggest inspirations (on Apple Music) isn’t sonic or lyrical, but ideological. The Strokes absolutely exploded in popularity because of how traditional their approach to rock was: stripped down to its core and laid naked in front of juvenile audiences. LCD Soundsystem has a serious commitment to being noncommittal, every song in their catalogue sounds like it's being drawn and quartered. These are absorbed principles contradicting and coalescing in the music of The F16s. Their latest album is quite good. It further furthers their musical ideologies.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">2026’s All Dogs Go To Heaven is the ghee to 2016’s Triggerpunkte’s butter. Refined and clarified. The ten-year difference is a clever sleight of hand in the ‘Albums’ section of their discography. As you may know, The F16s did not disappear for a decade. EPs count separately, and they’re full of those, so the presentation of this latest project as an album makes a statement about the statement that music’s making.</h1>

<h1 class="left">The track Trickortreat sits roughly at the halfway point of the project, and is host to this sporadic, sprawling instrumental breakdown. Spanning across several monuments, transitioning seamlessly from keys to bass to guitar, then cascading into a conversation between them, giving way to one final refrain of the chorus, feels like starting a sentence and figuring out how it ends later. This is the album’s bildungsroman, the story within the story of their story. The instrumental arrangement that signifies the album, the album that signifies a decade of waxing the proverbial car, the proverbial car that grew up to become an aircraft, hurtling towards a future that's not ready for it. All Dogs Go To Heaven sounds like sitting facing the opposite direction on a speeding train, like going into the future backwards, like looking at what you’ve just left behind.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">The back half of the LP is its strongest, drenched in a very special shade of rock that feels like a natural next step for the band. It welcomes fans into this texture step-by-step. It crashes on your couch for a few days to a lifetime. There’s some Dominic Fike-isms in Little Mama’s Boy where the whiny lead vocals and bratty guitars sound like they’re attempting to outpedal the effect pedals. The drums are crisped to perfection, like they’re booming in a different dimension. A lot of The F16s songs do this fun thing of crescendoing a third of the way before a grand outro, but Little Mama’s Boy seeks to subvert. There’s these haunting, guttural screams that cut off whatever progress you think the song was going to make. I love the characters that Joshua plays, I love how violently sharp every recorded instrument sounds. Budgets were high, and so were The F16s.</h1>

<h1 class="right">Their management sent us nudes. We watched them jump off into a lake for the shoot of the cover art for All Dogs Go To Heaven. They were naked, kinda, but I just wanted to know what kind of naked this was. Was this freedom? Was this shame? Was this honesty? Was this not for public consumption? There was this almost innocent hesitance in the crotch-clutching clips they sent us, and now I’m supposed to go see them fully clothed at a vinyl listening session in Idoru, after which I’m going to tag along on their car ride from Bandra to somewhere in South Bombay for a podcast taping. I’m here at a packed PR day for them.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Idoru fits the album. The sound system is present without being imposing. The opener, Fee Fi Fo Fum, is sultry, jazzy and effervescent, music for swaying quietly. Nobody talks over the opener, the whispers are part of the listening experience. Vinyl texture, grain and fuzz, is predictable. Predictable like a hug, the same experience every time. Joshua yells “this sucks!” in the silence between Don’t be shy and the lead single Mt. Whateverest. Unsure if he’s talking about the song that preceded or succeeded his comment. Vinyl as a group-listening medium also dictates a stoppage. Halftime. We have to hear a few words from the band before flipping it over. Guitarist Abhinav “Booby” Krishnaswami describes All Dogs Go To Heaven as “one of the easiest albums to ever make”. He claims they had the title before they had the music. They recorded in the hills in Ooty, where time and money weren’t a constraint. They’ve described the sound as “getting back to what we used to do”.</h1>

<h1 class="left">So Unique, Utterly Special exists in this sweet spot somewhere between surf rock and turf pop (Mt. Whateverest actually made it to Konami's eFootball 2027 videogame). Described as “for the baddies”, it spirals into a rager about halfway, resulting in yet another fistfight with the pedals. It’s the most emblematic song on the album, it feels like a testament to the mental and spatial environment within which the music is created. They’re the baddies. The F16s have mastered the art of chilling and hanging out. Letting things fall into place themselves is an underrated part of the creative process. If reaching conclusions is genuinely this easy for them, then they’ve figured out something a lot of us haven’t.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">The album cover is further evidence. They jumped into that reservoir individually to map it out, then jumped together, looked at the photos, and decided it was done. Skinny dipping as a group is also a romance between space and time. The space to jump, the time spent together, a few inches apart and a few years of friendship.</h1>

<h1 class="right">“Listening parties are weird - you feel like a cuck.” is a fitting way to end your own listening party, but Joshua has a point. Music has become this passive medium that files artists into taste categories more than individual acts of effort. The F16s are very impassioned folks, all details matter, everything counts, the vitriol displayed towards modern streaming algorithms is simply a plea to effort. Buying a vinyl is a display of affection towards the creator, attending a show is an intimate conversation. They didn’t want to, or couldn’t explain the music; “to explain poetry is to betray it”. But All Dogs Go To Heaven is explanation enough, it’s an invitation to come relax with them, and know that that’s enough.</h1>

In conversation with The F16s

<h1 class="left">Mannav: “Why do you guys love the EP format so much?”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Sashank: “We don’t.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Abhinav: “This [ADGTH] is our effort to step away from that”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Sashank: “It’s cheap.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Mannav: “So it’s not a current lover, but something you were forced to do before?”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “Yeah, it’s like fast food.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Abhinav: Hey, hey. I see why everyone wants to be scandalous or whatever, but it’s fine. At that point in time, we had songs that we wanted to put out, so we decided “Okay, let’s do it 4 at a time”. It’s not like we had a huge repository. It’s like “We have these songs, let’s put them out.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Mannav: “So the gestation period’s not really that long.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Abhinav: “Yeah, for Is It Time To Eat The Rich? We had composed that stuff while being in the lockdown. We were holed up together, and we wrote those songs, and we wanted to put them out as quickly as we could, just for it to be an accurate representation of where we were. Even for Weekend Friends, same thing. “We have these 4 songs, they’re good. Let’s just put them out.” Instead of waiting for ourselves to write like 4 or 6 more songs.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Mannav: “Where do you guys primarily record?”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Abhinav: “This time around, we recorded everything in-house in Harshan’s studio. It was a mixture of Harshan’s studio and the studio we decided to set up when we went to record this album in Ooty, for a month.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “Thank you, Booby’s Daddy”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Abhinav: “Oh yeah, my dad’s house, in Ooty. I was just like “Hey, can we modify your living room for a month so we can do this?” And he’s like; “Yeah, sure.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “Booby’s dad also really loves me.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Abhinav: “I mean, I’m glad you think that”.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “Booby can’t accept the fact that-”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Abhinav: “Yeah, he called you George, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Womp womp, brother”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “That’s our dad, man.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Abhinav: “Shut up and kiss me, bitch. Huh? So yeah, we decided to just take some time, spend a month, and make this record basically.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Mannav: “How do you guys spend time between recording and touring? What does a day off look like for you guys?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Sashank: “Working out, cooking, spending time with the dogs.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “Chickens, as of now.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Sashank: “Yeah, just taking time out to spend with nature and things that are not in the immediate periphery of what would contribute to the music. Like, a lot of the inspiration for this album came from outside of music. It came from love of, like, just living in different ways. If that means self-care, just being around nature or animals. Whatever could inspire you doesn’t necessarily have to come from the world of music, right? So that really helped, I guess.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “I think one of the biggest overlooked luxuries in life is enjoying a day that’s a weekday. Like doing something on a Tuesday that you absolutely love, that’s such a luxury. Being in a band, we enjoy that, you know? Just not doing anything for a weekday, even though we play gigs on a weekend. Or we take a couple months off to really get into work mode. One of the biggest enjoyable things about being in a band is that you can do jack-all on a Tuesday. Everybody hates Mondays, we dig ‘em.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Mannav: Why does Vinyl feel so important in this day and age?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Harshan: It’s kind of like history repeats itself. We’ve gone so digital that now vinyl has found a resurgence. You see a lot of people buying vinyls and listening to them on vinyl. It just sounds so satisfying when you listen to a vinyl, it’s also the right way to listen to an album. Because nowadays, everybody’s used to the short form, they have an attention span of 30 seconds to a minute. It’s nice to have a vinyl, listen to the entire album, side A and side B, kinda get lost in it and enjoy it in its entirety. That’s why we were super excited about it. We started with CDs, and now it’s like, “can’t wait to put it on wax.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Abhinav: “That being said, I’m okay to never do this again. One of the headaches is-”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “What headache you had? Only Shank had headache.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Sashank: “Yeah, I had all the headaches”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Harshan: “Yeah, what headache you had, Bob?”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Abhinav: “No but if I vouch for your headaches… gaand maar. Put that in the article.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “No, I think the medium is really cool, because when we first started, we put it on CDs, and we still have some of those CDs. I think music is how you decorate time, but putting it into a medium like a CD or USB or cassette or now, a wax, is how you decorate space.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">*general applause from the rest of the band*</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “I mean, I am the lyricist, I am the wordsmith, forgive me if I word too much.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Mannav: And it’s also a lot about your enunciation, ‘cause ‘Little Mama’s boy’, the reason I told you that’s my favourite song off the album is because the whininess that you employ is so intentional. It’s like you’re playing a character.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “I am a whingy bastard, it’s like an aggressive whine, you know what I mean?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Sashank: “I also like the fact that if you’re listening to something on vinyl, it’s purely out of an intention to spend that money and spend that time to take your hands and tactile-ly fucking hold it and put it onto something rather than playing it on auto shuffle. We know that people who buy the vinyl are always people who care. We’ve lost a way, in a sense where ‘care’ comes from engagement. I think human beings as a species have lost the idea of intention. Everything is generated and given to you. So the people who do buy the vinyl, from the band’s perspective, there is a sense of care. And like Harshan said, things are going in a cyclical fashion, you’re going to get tired of consuming a certain way and it’s gonna go back in time.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: "Statistically speaking, vinyl sales have never been so high, not just in India, but the world right now. So it’s just a good time to put out this medium, just generally speaking. Because we do want to sell. Streaming is getting really redundant and annoying. It’s too convenient. It’s low effort, compared to the effort we put into making something for you to listen to. Just a bit of reciprocation, you know, put a ring on it!</h1>

<h1 class="right">Abhinav: “Even before the vinyl resurgence and what-not, even if we’re talking about torrents, there is something about you, as a consumer expending some amount of effort in procuring the product.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “If you love us, do something illegal for us.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Mannav: “Can I get torrents of your albums? Asking for a friend.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Abhinav: “I mean, we can put it up on Pirate Bay or whatever.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Joshua: “I can accidentally AirDrop you the album”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Abhinav: “No. Take the effort. Go rip the songs. But like I was saying, as consumers, you put some of yourself into getting the music. People used to shoplift tapes, you pirate stuff, you spend time looking for stuff online, but then with streaming, it’s too easy. You have every recorded piece of music at your fingertips, it’s kinda crazy.</h1>

<h1 class="left">Joshua: “We have Swiggy now, you don’t have to go out to pick your veggies, you get it to you in minutes. Even dating, it’s become a marketplace, you can just go online and swipe until you like something, there’s no effort.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Abhinav: “Yeah, so because the effort is less, the obsession with what you’re getting is less. You’re not obsessed with anything anymore because you didn’t have to expend yourself to be able to get it. Time, money, whatever, you’re expending something to get something.</h1>

<h1 class="right">Mannav: “I’m glad you guys went on that streaming tirade because my next question was actually pretty similar. Bands like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Massive Attack have taken their music off of Spotify. A lot of people might argue that that’s a privileged act. Do you think it is?”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “I don’t think it's a privilege we can afford right now. Booby wanted to.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Sashank: “I wanted to too, but you gotta be practical about it. You’re gonna chop off your own limb, so you need to be okay with that. Bands like King Gizzard have an organic environment in Europe and Australia and America that have audiences who particularly take the effort to go see live music as a source of entertainment. In India, it’s become a byproduct, like if it doesn't work on my reels, maybe it’s not okay. We’re losing that audience to this. So us taking our music off [of Spotify] would be detrimental to us. Although, in our hearts, we want to do it.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Abhinav: “Not yet. Maybe one day we’ll have the privilege of being like, fuck Spotify.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Joshua: “Besides, I don’t mind using our royalties to fund AI militaries. We built these missiles from 12,000,000 streams of Moonchild.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Mannav: “What’s a sound experiment you haven’t been able to conduct yet?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Abhinav: “I guess, back masking, reversed vocals.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Sashank: “Josh singing in Tamil”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Joshua: “I think I want to end a set on a really high BPM, about 140 or 150, like heart thumping, rock and roll, driving stuff. An experiment I would like to do with the boys is just have that high BPM from start to finish for 2 hours. But we write songs with ebbs and flows, so we can’t really afford to do that. But we do have songs that hit that energy, I think a thought I’d like to entertain is to have that energy full time for 2 hours, absolutely drain them.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Abhinav: “Right. And since we’re on it, King Gizzard, they’ve gone into modular synthesisers now. Maybe?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Mannav: “Has your interpersonal relationship with each other grown more coworker-y or lover-y over the years?”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Abhinav: “I think it was headed in the coworker-y direction till we made this record. I think the time we spent sort of made it lover-y, as you said. Yeah, we were fucking, straight up.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Sashank: “We also went to prison together.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Mannav: “You went to prison together on this trip?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Sashank: “Well, immigration prison in 2009, Hong Kong. It also kinda brought us together.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Joshua: “We’re siblings at this point, me and Booby share a dad but that’s about it.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Abhinav: “All right, George”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Mannav: “I think I just have one more. Album cover: How, what, why, when, who?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Sashank: “How: By happenstance. Why: Because the whole creative process has been so saturated that people don’t know what they want anymore. And for us to find out what we want truly just came from being in the moment. Whether that means what the album cover became eventually, or just letting go of what people think is the right way to make a cover, like go into the studio, do the thing, like how you see something on the internet and you’re like, oh, maybe that’s the way. No. I think for us, it was the opposite. Why: Because we were tired of doing it the way things had already been done. Where: Ooty. This beautiful fucking reservoir that we had to trespass into. And in that moment all of us kind of had this unanimous syncopation of knowing that something being done here would mean more than going to a random studio in the city just hiring things. This is purely coming out of the moment. All of us skinny dipped together and made a moment out of it. And for us, whether it hits or not doesn't matter, because it brought us closer.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Abhinav: “It was just a wholesome day, man. We were in Ooty, we just went out, because there’s obviously enough things to look at. We decided to go to this reservoir that we had been to like years prior. We went to this joint just to hang out.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Sashank: “There was no intention, we didn’t know we were going there to shoot the cover.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Abhinav: “It just happened to be the right place at the right time, and it felt right. By Shank’s third jump he was like “hey guys, the water is okay”. So we just decided to do it together. We did the jump, all together, one time, and that’s what's on the album.</h1>

<h1 class="left">Sashank: “We did our own solo jumps to frame the actual image. Like it would be great to have this humanoid fucking blob. There’s no one face or one body.”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Abhinav: “It just sort of worked out. We came out, saw the shots, and realised this is it.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Joshua: “Dried our balls, and went home.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">Images: courtesy of Prayoon Sajeev & Isaac Nico</h1>