Brooklyn Shoegaze Meets Sufi Longing On Minaxi’s 'Darbar-e-Ishq'

Originating in the late 1980s UK underground, shoegaze earned its moniker from music journalists mocking guitarists glued to their pedalboards during live performances. The genre transformed the electric guitar from a lead instrument into an architectural generator of continuous sound. By chaining multi-effects processors, digital delays, and overdrive units, pioneer acts like My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, and Slowdive replaced standard verse-chorus arrangements with towering waves of noise, burying vocals low in the mix and allowing them to act as additional instruments rather than the primary focus.

Operating out of Brooklyn, Minaxi translates these historical UK foundations into an American context, pairing them directly with Hindustani classical phrasing and Sufi devotional traditions. The four-piece — Steve Carlin, Thomas Herndon, Liam Christian, and Shrenik Ganatra — maintains a strict self-sufficient approach, handling their own recording engineering and visual art. Their new album, 'Darbar-e-Ishq' exists as a meeting point for these distinct musical genealogies.

The project opens with 'Your Love / Tere Ishq Mein', my favourite on the record. Urdu vocals drift through ringing sustain, hitting with the emotional weight of a distant memory brought suddenly back into focus. Long decay tails and hypnotic melodic loops set an immediate tone of spiritual longing that anchors the rest of the tracklist.

From there, 'Dilli' moves focus toward urban scale. Featuring guest contributions from Milan Ganatra, the arrangement builds a dense wall of noise that mirrors the frantic physical gravity of Delhi itself — balancing the roar of late-night city streets against sudden, isolated pockets of silence.

On 'Jaan', the band drops the wall of static to let grief steer the song. Delicate vocal lines and aching guitar figures take center stage over mid-tempo percussion, proving the band can carry emotional weight through restraint and open space just as effectively as full volume.

'Dil-e-Khumaar' serves as the centerpiece, spanning over six minutes alongside Milan Ganatra and John Westphal. Moving through long static drones before erupting into continuous waves of distortion, the piece plays out like a slow-burning meditation that stretches time and tests the limits of traditional song structure.

The second half of Darbar-e-Ishq hands these compositions over to electronic producers like Rajah Betta, The Phalanx, SG Deadbeat, and Slowdive’s Simon Scott. Rather than retreading the original arrangements, these remixes dismantle the material into sub-bass dubs, modular textures, and syncopated beatwork built for late-night driving.

By melding the mechanics of British shoegaze with South Asian devotional roots, Minaxi delivers a record that commands total focus. Darbar-e-Ishq belongs in headphones in the middle of the night, when the rest of the world turns off.

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