On His New Album, JBABE Builds A Monument To Feeling Too Much

With nine tracks, a companion short film and a title borrowed from the language of vast emotions, JBABE is thinking bigger than ever.

JBABE, returns with A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe, a nine-track album that expands beyond music into film, performance and emotional excavation.JBABE

Published on:

12 Jun 2026, 10:00 am

3 min read

Summary

Josh Fernandez, better known as JBABE, returns with 'A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe', a nine-track album that expands beyond music into film, performance and emotional excavation. Blending indie-pop, ballad rock and cinematic orchestration, the record explores faith, surrender, longing and self-discovery. Accompanied by a short film directed by Lendrick Kumar, the project establishes JBABE as one of Indian independent music's most ambitious and singular voices

With 'A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe', Josh Fernandez, better known as JBABE, embraces the ambition of creating a mammoth of an album with 9 songs wholeheartedly, delivering a project that extends beyond music into film and performance.

Released on June 10, the nine-track record finds the Goa and Chennai-based musician stretching his songwriting across indie-pop, ballad rock and cinematic soundscapes. Entirely written, composed and produced by Fernandez, the album sees him moving from distorted guitars and live drums to sweeping orchestral arrangements, building songs from scratch.

The album feels expansive without losing its emotional core. At a time when playlists often reward brevity, A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe embraces scale and atmosphere. It is the work of an artist unafraid to indulge in grand ideas while remaining rooted in deeply personal songwriting. Throughout the record, Fernandez moves between these extremes, pairing personal reflection with arrangements that often seem to stretch toward the theatrical.

Accompanying the release is a nine-minute short film directed by filmmaker Lendrick Kumar, a longtime collaborator of Fernandez. The film feels like a fever dream, unfolding in chapters, the tail end feeling like the aftermath or the war we fight while recovering from love. Conceived as a visual extension of the album's themes, the film pushed both artist and director to their creative and physical limits. Most notably, Fernandez performed a sequence in which he set himself on fire for a single continuous take, sustaining first-degree burns during the shoot.

I'm not sure whether it was intentional, but the album shares its title with a collection of poems by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. The collection is a cocktail of emotions, especially the drops that spill from the shaker while the drink is being made. Pessoa's writing is melancholic, angry and full of anguish, as though it is perpetually on fire, but it also toes the line of feeling like the words of a man who has surrendered and is just making meaning and whimsy out of the cards he’s dealt, much like JBABE's album.

In that sense, the two works mirror each other. Both are driven by an urgency to undo and unravel the kinds of human emotions that are more often felt than spoken, lingering in the spaces where language begins to fail. The album also dives into the artist’s faith and the fact that part of that surrender comes from that belief in something larger than yourself.

With A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe, Fernandez reaffirms his place as one of Indian independent music's most singular voices, an artist still committed to building worlds rather than simply releasing songs.

Following the album's release, JBABE is set to take the music on the road with performances planned across Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai.

Follow JBABE on Instagram and listen to A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe below.