Song You Need: Tara Lily’s spirited “Double Time”

The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.

Peckham-born British-Bengali artist Tara Lily has an eclectic style that stitches together R&B, electronic, and traditional Indian sounds into something to call her own. On her 2022 EP Last Flight Out, the 24-year-old sang about damaged relationships and the grind of living alone in an unfamiliar city, laying her feelings of isolation between slick grooves and bass-heavy moments of introspection.

Lily returns today with her first new music since that project. “Double Time” is a drum ’n’ bass banger in which she faces up to her own mortality and refuses to shrink. It comes with a video shot on the streets of Mumbai and Goa, with the Indian cities providing inspiration for visual story that pushes the tranquility of nature up against the volatility of human interaction.

In an email to The FADER, Lily said she wrote the song about “Two gods, two masks, two worlds.” The video, meanwhile, “reflects the fast pace of life, taking risks, losing control, death, living life to the full, human relationships, our relationships with divine powers, and on who we think we are.”