Therapy can be expensive. It involves hours of examining yourself, sharing your deepest vulnerabilities, only to realise that you were exaggerating problems. But once in a while, it can lead to magical breakthroughs. Mumbai-based rapper Shah Rule’s latest album, Call You Right Back, I’m in Therapy, is the result of a cathartic journey through himself. With multiple collaborators, and a musical range that goes from jazz to Afro-beats, old style hip-hop and live instrumentation, it certainly sounds like it was worth the journey.

The 30-year-old rapper agrees. “You cannot force music. It is a representation of where you are; a timestamp of your life,” he explains. The album, he adds, is a continuation of his previous EP, Hooked from 2021. The five-song EP was a metaphor for the struggles of the pandemic, an addiction to digital toxicity. The new one is about healing. “It begins and ends on a positive note,” the rapper remarks.