Bollywood albums often have a tendency to be too long. Twelve songs when six would have done it. A romantic duet wedged between two action tracks.
An item number that has nothing to do with the story but lands on Friday morning because someone felt the film needed a weekend push.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge does none of that
Five songs. Just over nineteen minutes. Every single track earns its place. Composer Shashwat Sachdev, the man behind the music of Uri: The Surgical Strike and Kesari, has put together an album that feels more like a continuous mood than a playlist. You can hear him reaching for something bigger this time and for the most part, he gets there.
Aari Aari - The Opener That Hits Two Generations at Once
The album starts with its loudest moment. Aari Aari is a rework of the Bombay Rockers track that a certain generation of early 2000s music listeners will recognise instantly. Navtej Singh Rehal of Bombay Rockers brings back the original chant while Khan Saab, Jasmine Sandlas and Sudhir Yaduvanshi handle the vocal sections. Rappers Reble and Token come in with sharp, punchy verses over the beat.
This is the kind of track that does not grab you on the first listen. It builds. By the third or fourth time through you start hearing things you missed and that is when it clicks. Easy to picture this playing over a slow-motion sequence where nobody is speaking and everything is tense.
Jaan Se Guzarte Hain - The Most Traditional Moment on the Album
Khan Saab and lyricist Irshad Kamil together. That pairing alone tells you this track is going to be different from everything around it.
Jaan Se Guzarte Hain sits closest to a classical Bollywood film song out of everything on the album. Khan Saab has a warmth in his voice that suits the emotional weight the title carries - there is sacrifice in it, devotion, the feeling of giving something up for something larger than yourself. Kamil's writing does not convey the emotion. It just states it plainly and that plainness is where the power comes from.
And in those few notes, Sachdev does something that pages of dialogue would struggle to do. The suggestion is there, Hamza got his revenge, he can go back to being Jaskirat now, he can go home, but none of it is going to feel the way he thought it would. Whatever he did in that country, whatever was done to him, is going to live in his body long after the mission is over. Victory and wound in the same place at the same time.
Because that piano is the last thing you hear on the entire album, it does not just close the song. It closes everything. And it leaves you sitting with a feeling that is hard to name and harder to shake.
The Verdict
Shashwat Sachdev has made an album that knows exactly what it is trying to do and does it without wasting a second. Five tracks covering five completely different emotional registers, nostalgia and energy, tension and restraint, sacrifice and devotion, ambition and intimacy, and finally something that sits between victory and grief and refuses to pick one.
There is no weak track here. There is no track you skip. That alone puts this among the better Bollywood film albums in recent memory.
The film opens on March 19. The music was already doing its job weeks before that.
Read more news like this on www.etnownews.com