Why home has become the heartbeat of When Chai Met Toast’s music: ‘We always talked about it in our music’

For When Chai Met Toast, ten years of playing together has meant more than just building an audience — it has been about shaping a voice that feels unmistakably their own. The Kerala-based quartet has spent much of the past decade on the road, playing shows across continents and finding ways to grow without losing sight of who they are.

Kerala-based band When Chai Met Toast has recently released their single Dreamland

“Even though we say that 10 years has gone by quickly, we’ve had a very big share of being together. That is one major reason how the songwriting has improved, because all four of us have quietly understood each other. Everybody’s growing musically, and everybody’s pushing each other to also improve, grow, and nurture ourselves,” says their forntman, Ashwin Gopakumar.

Their new single Dreamland, for which they collaborated with singer Job Kurian reflects that balance between evolution and belonging. Written during one of their international tours, the track carries both the ache of distance and the pull of nostalgia, while drawing from their roots in Kerala. “It’s the most explicitly Kerala song that we have on the album. But if we were from somewhere else, that place would have been Dreamland. It’s basically talking about our home,” band’s guitarist Achyuth Jaigopal says.

The theme of home runs through the larger album, though never in one fixed sense. “Home need not be the place. Home could be a person, home could be memories. There are songs like Never Felt This Way Before, which talks about finding your home in a person, and then there is I Always, which is about nostalgia and how things were in the 90s,” adds Achyuth. In many ways, it is less of a new discovery and more of a full circle moment. “I don’t think we went back to home. I think we were always talking about home. If you listen to our first EP Joy of Little Things, it starts with the line ‘home’. This time, it’s all about it,” he says.

Musically too, Dreamland anchors itself in what listeners associate with the band while widening the soundscape. Known for their refreshingly folksy tunes, WCMT instead leaned into traditional Kerala instruments for this one. “We wanted to make it celebratory and nothing fit better than these instruments. The energy we got was rooted, cultural, and still very much WCMT,” says Ashwin.

For a band that began as four musicians trying to find a common ground, the ease with which they now arrive at a sound is perhaps their biggest achievement. “We don’t push ourselves to say this is a WCMT sound. At this point, what we make just naturally becomes WCMT. It’s the four of us more than anything else.”

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