The article looks at 'Abracadabra,' Run It’s The Kid’s new album, marking their return as a duo with a shift towards a more electronic-leaning sound while retaining their cinematic songwriting. It focuses on how the album traces the emotional landscape of a relationship beyond typical highs and lows, exploring themes of longing, vulnerability, intimacy, and self-reflection, framing it as a cohesive body of work about how love unsettles, reshapes, and rebuilds a person over time.
Nearly a decade after their 2016 debut, Delhi-based indie outfit Run It’s The Kid return with their new album ‘Abracadabra,’ with just Shantanu Pandit and Dhruv Bhola this time around instead of the four-piece act. The folk-leaning, waltz-like softness of their eponymous debut album gives way here to a more electronic-leaning body of work, but with the same cinematic songwriting, if not more refined.
The album opens on an unusually bright note — ‘Yayayaya’ takes an existential look at life and all the hoops we run through to be a functioning human being. From the self, it moves to ‘Quicksand,’ echoing the spirit of Thomas Carew’s poem Mediocrity In Love Rejected — asking for love or hate, anything but that lukewarm in-between. The title track, ‘Abracadabra,’ paints a dreamy and poignant portrait of a kind of girl that makes you wonder with longing when you’re gonna see her next. ‘Hourglass’ slows things down, with building a dream with someone special who makes time and its passing matter to you.
‘Wedding Ring’ shifts into a more sultry, but amorous track that feels like a pledge for connection, where being held is enough to make the hurt stop for a bit. The emptiness that bubbles up on this track turns into ‘Medicine,’ a broody, woozy dive inside one’s head that’s lost somewhere under the bed. But we get back up with ‘Summana’ more hopeful, more energetic, with heavy 808s and voice modulation. It feels powerful, almost like a frenzied acceptance of things as they are, and the joy that can come from that surrender. ‘Talk To Me In French’ pulls you into a playful imagination of a relationship — all the expansive ways you want to experience someone when you’re into them, acoustic at its core but threaded with sparse, creative electronic touches. With ‘Rubble,’ we confront all the things that aren’t working out, before the end, ‘When It All Goes Down’, but together.
Over 10 tracks mapping the terrains of a romantic connection that go beyond the reductive, perceived highs and lows of a relationship-cycle in pop culture, the artists explore, as the title track suggests, all the ways a person you love can ‘cut you and put you back like Abracadabra’ with an astute but kind self-reflection, and vivid storytelling.
Follow Run It’s The Kid here & listen to the album below:
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