For Delhi-based band Leading Drops, their latest single ‘Aatmak’ is a response to grief, loss, and the silence that often surrounds conversations about mental health and suicide.
The song emerged from experiences that members of the six-piece band have carried with them for years. Guitarist Nishant Tiwari recalls losing a classmate to suicide during school, a memory that stayed with him long after the funeral ended. “One of my teachers told us something that stayed with me,” he says. “‘When you commit suicide to end the pain, it never ends. It just passes on to your loved ones who are left behind.’ That line never left me.”
Years later, after Tiwari and vocalist Shreyansh Mohan Verma formed the band in college, the two were confronted with loss once again when a close mutual friend died by suicide. “That was the breaking point for us,” says Verma. “We were angry, heartbroken, and helpless. But we were also songwriters. We realised that if we had a stage and a voice, we had to use it for this.”
The result was ‘Aatmak’, a song built as much around emotion and atmosphere as lyrics. The track opens with thunder, ambulance sirens, and students shouting “we want justice”. “It’s the sound of chaos that follows a loss — the confusion, the anger, the headlines,” says Tiwari. “Only after that noise settles do we let the music breathe, because that’s how grief works. First comes shock, then silence.”
The song’s long instrumental section, says Verma, was designed to force listeners to sit with difficult emotions before the words arrive. “We rewrote, we cried, we stopped sessions midway,” he says. “But we told ourselves: if this song makes one person pause and reach out instead of giving up, the discomfort was worth it.”
Drummer Sharang Arora says the core message of the track is simple but urgent. “The pain doesn’t end with you, it just passes on to the people who love you,” he says. “So please don’t go through it alone. Talk to someone. Choose hope. Choose to stay.”
Others involved with the project see ‘Aatmak’as part of a wider shift in how artists engage with mental health. Lakshay Kukreja, sound engineer and co-producer, notes that when musicians speak openly about these issues, it helps normalise conversations that many still struggle to have. “It becomes not just a creative choice, but a quiet responsibility,” he says.
Deep Chatterjee, pianist and producer of the ensemble, adds that the song grew from “the fragile space between what we can empathise with and what someone experiencing mental illness truly feels”. Music, he says, became a way to bridge that gap emotionally, even when words could not.
