Shakthisree Gopalan Drew From The Humanity of Characters in ‘Test’ for an Unconventional Soundtrack 

In addition to the star power of actors like R. Madhavan, Nayanthara, and Siddharth, Netflix’s new sports-thriller film Test also saw director S. Sashikanth enlist singer-songwriter, producer and composer Shakthisree Gopalan to make her debut as music director after more than 15 years in the music industry. 

Where she’s been previously known as a South Indian playback singer as well as an independent artist with English songs, Test gave Gopalan a chance to come to the front as a composer in the film music world. She says it wasn’t even the first time Sashikanth—an architect turned film producer who made his directorial debut with Test—had asked her to be part of one of his film projects. The first time, she passed it on to another composer she felt was more suited to the story, the second project ended up getting shelved. “Just a little before or around the time of the pandemic, Sashi said he’ll send me a story and asked me to check it out. It was so gripping. I was literally standing up by the time I got to the second half. I sat and finished reading it in like one sitting,” she says. 

A story revolving around cricket, family drama and life’s struggles, Gopalan says “the humanity” in the lead characters spoke to her. “I could really hear vivid Ideas and big emotions, the underlying current of where the story was,” she says. Initial discussions about the music for Test involved Sashi pitching for just a couple of songs. While the director’s goal was to make Gopalan’s compositions add another dimension to the storytelling. Gopalan adds, “And I feel like, for me, I was just trying to find prosody in all of this, right? How much can I dial up, how much can I be in alignment, and be in sync with these emotions [of the film]?” 

Often thinking visually when it comes to singing as well as performing, Gopalan recounts how she works very closely with a collaborator on lights and visuals for her shows—the artist pinned colors and emotions to the music she was making, drawing from the storyline of Test. To that end, Gopalan crafts unhurried, grandiose and lush songs for the soundtrack, out in Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. 

While lyricists for each songs differed, the sonic intent is the same. With seasoned hip-hop artist Yogi B, Gopalan created the exhilarating “Arena,” which she counts as her first hip-hop creation. She says, “I would have never thought that I would make a song and then call up Yogi B and be like, ‘Yo, there’s a track you want to stick some rap on this? It was bizarre now when I’m looking back at it, but it’s so naturally evolved. We wanted it to feel so Chennai.” A song that’s all about getting pumped up, the song also includes mridangam by Toronto-based Tamil artist Yanchan Produced. 

Gopalan offers a flipside to “Arena” with the instrumental track “Fall Of The Hero” which comes towards the end of Test. “There will be so many people who are larger than life, but his [Siddharth’s character, who plays a cricketer] struggle is his struggle. I’ve heard Lady Gaga talk about how she went to [perform at] a concert and the next day, there’s nobody next to her, like she has to pick up [her life] in a hotel room by herself,” Gopalan says. 

The appropriately quiet but lush “Lullaby” and “Hope” are both sung and composed by Gopalan. For “Lullaby,” she drew from the often-overlooked emotional and invisible labor that women put in, inspired by lines in the screenplay. She says, “We end up compromising on ourselves quite a bit and we put ourselves last on the list a lot of times. I understand people may be going through their own things, so sometimes a lot of women have also facilitated this, being unseen and telling themselves, ‘I’m just invisible. I don’t really matter’.” The characters played by Nayanthara and Meera Jasmine thus got a theme with “Lullaby,” as a note (and lullaby) to themselves. 

With singer Akshay Yesodharan, there’s “Broken Glass,” a dark, stirring song that was inspired by everyone from Thundercat to Steven Wilson to Massive Attack. “When Thundercat sings, ‘Nobody move, there’s blood on the floor/And I can’t find my heart’ [on 2017 song ‘Them Changes’], I’m like, ‘Wait, drop everything, you have my undivided attention!’ That’s the cool thing you can do as a storyteller—everything changes based on how you ramp up to something. I’ve always loved this whole larger-than-life, Steven Wilson-meets-Massive Attack kind of super dark but slow poison kind of thing. I think that’s way more potent as opposed to a jump scare.” 

After Test, there might be more film projects for Gopalan as a composer. While she spoke about an EP of her solo material a couple of years ago–back when she fresh from graduating from Berklee College of Music in New York—it’s been on hold. She invokes her original craft as an architect, about how “in the beginning, there’s a lot of fun” but then the execution takes much longer. Still, the excitement about those songs persist. “I feel like this is one of those things where I did not know there were so many unknown unknowns, so I didn’t really know what to anticipate. But the only thing I know is I wanted to make a lot of time and space and be honest with it.”