Chennai’s Sunflower Tape Machine puts noise at the centre of his debut album

An artiste’s debut album is often their most personal piece of work — a distillation of the years, influences, instincts and experiments that led them to finding their voice. For Chennai-based independent musician Aryaman Singh, the new album is personal for another reason: it is five years of making music without ever quite setting out to make an album. “I didn’t start in 2021 thinking, ‘I’m going to make an album.’ All the songs I kept writing through the years just started making sense. At some point, I decided I wanted to stop releasing singles and put out an album. The narrative for my album at the time was: this is all the music I have, this is all the music I’ve made in the last few years, and I’m putting it in chronological order of it being made so you can see how I’ve evolved,” says Aryaman, who goes by Sunflower Tape Machine. Spanning eight tracks, I LIKE NOISE. MATTER OF FACT, I LOVE IT. is an indie/alternative rock record threaded with shoegaze (a subgenre of indie and alternative rock), with noise serving as its unifying force. The album moves between the more familiar Sunflower Tape Machine sound and a newer, more exploratory alt-rock territory, with a three-minute instrumental interlude of pure noise at its centre. Sunflower Tape Machine at Lollapalooza India 2026 | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement “The order of tracks now on the album is what I think is the most cohesive order for you to experience the album. That being said, listen to the album in its entirety. It’s meant to be heard from start to finish,” says Aryaman. At around 25 minutes, it is a relatively compact listen.The album, however, was not always called I LIKE NOISE. MATTER OF FACT, I LOVE IT. When Aryaman first decided to turn his accumulated songs into an album, he had a different idea in mind: I Like Music, a chronological collection that would trace his evolution as a musician. That changed when he began listening back to the songs and noticed something tying them together. “I was sitting in the studio, and I was listening to a lot of the stuff that I was going to put on the album. I was like, ‘Wait. Eight of these songs have such a cohesive narrative.’ And that narrative was noise,” he says. Sunflower Tape Machine | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement For five years, Aryaman made the album largely on his own, writing, recording and mixing the songs at home. His creative process usually begins with an instrumental, followed by humming melodies and fitting words into them; the lyrics, he says, typically come last. “My music is very melody first. Usually it’s full instrumental and then I fit stuff into it, and usually it’s choruses first and then the verses come after,” he says. Like every other song he has made, the entire production happens in his room in Chennai. Even the drums on the album’s final two tracks were recorded there, with Nikhil Rajkumar, who plays live with Sunflower and with bands including Godless and Demonic Resurrection, coming in to play them. But Chennai has influenced more than just where the album was made. “I’ve grown up being a huge film guy, and a lot of the films that I’ve watched are the reason for my vocabulary today and just being up to date with pop culture. So, in that sense, Chennai and its access to other art forms and just everything has definitely influenced the art that I make,” says Aryaman. He also credits the city’s slower, close-knit way of life for shaping the experiences that eventually find their way into his music. The album’s five-year gestation also meant Aryaman had to reckon with an earlier version of himself. The first song he wrote for the record, I Saw You, dates back to 2021, and rather than rework it to fit his current sound, he deliberately left much of it untouched. “I made it a point not to change too much because I felt like it was 2021 Sunflower’s story, and I don’t want to take that away from him,” he says. Sunflower Tape Machine | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement The difference is audible: He describes it as innocent in its sound and selection. “You can kind of see that this was made by someone who really wanted to make this but didn’t have too much of an idea what he was doing.” Perhaps that is what makes I LIKE NOISE. MATTER OF FACT, I LOVE IT. feel less like a debut and more like a document of becoming. Aryaman has spent the last few years learning how to make music, learning the industry around it, and, in the process, learning how to recognise his own voice. He could have gone back and polished away the traces of the musician he was in 2021, but chose not to.Now, that five-year journey is taking him beyond Chennai. Aryaman will perform a set at Music Matters in Singapore, one of Asia’s leading music industry events. For an album that began as a collection of songs written without a larger plan, it feels like another step in Sunflower Tape Machine’s evolution — this time, taking the noise a little further from home.I LIKE NOISE. MATTER OF FACT, I LOVE IT. is now streaming on major music streaming platforms.