After what we’ve described as a “veritable grab bag” of releases covering everything from doom scrolling to beaked whales, LA’s Sun Kin turned to a more personal style for 2024 single ‘Just Double Checking‘, Kabir Kumar collaborating with their partner to explore a lifetime of experiences with anxiety. Set for release next month, the latest Sun Kin album Bobby’s Voice is yet more personal still, with Kumar this time teaming up with their father Rajesh Prakash (RP) Kumar to write about the life of their uncle and brother, Kiran ‘Bobby’ Kumar. “Bobby lived a difficult life of disability and invisibility in India after an accident in his twenties, and near the end of his life, RP was the only person he got to talk to,” as the album notes explain. “After his death of a stroke in 2018, RP decided to write out many of the words Bobby had spoken to him, and then the father and son collaborated to make them into songs through Sun Kin’s signature composition and production.”
As lead single ‘Of Some Use’ attests, the result is every bit as compassionate and poignant as you might expect. The single embodies the tone of the album, presenting Bobby as a person thrust into a despairing situation yet still yearning to assert his own personality and worth. A challenge faced by many disabled people within a society so rigidly ableist, and one which persists despite (or sometimes even because of) the various attempts society makes to signal otherwise. “Writing books with their toes / Paint with brushes in their teeth / No arms still shoot arrows / Making pottery with their feet / Preening on TV shows / Racing wheelchairs down the street,” as one telling verse puts it. “All these heroes in the news / I just want to be of some use.”
Far more than an act of remembrance, Bobby’s Voice becomes a comment on the public attitude towards disabled people, as well as a highly personal attempt to right those wrongs in retrospect. To finally grant Bobby that which was denied him in life as one final gesture of love. “One of the key things that keeps me awake was how, with his disability, came invisibility: how a full grown, virile young man was deprived of his agency, his manhood, and most cruelly, his power of expression,” RP concludes. “So—maybe too little, too late—I decided to give Bobby his voice back.”