Whenever Anurag Basu and Pritam have worked together, they've come up with something memorable. Gangster, Life in a… Metro, Barfi, Jagga Jasoos, it's a decently long working history. Their works suggest a director who has an ear for music, and a composer who feels at home with the director, but there's no running theme as such that binds their albums, except perhaps that the songs are almost always melodically strong.
"Aabad Barbaad", the first track from their new film, is an upbeat, happy number, that seems to have been made under the diktat to keep it 'listener-friendly', most apparent in the faux-electronic arrangement sections. But the central tune has an old fashioned gentleness about it, like you could imagine Kishore Kumar, or an Udit Narayan, crooning it. (Arijit Singh smiles though the song).
It doesn't resemble any of Basu and Pritam's earlier works, but "In Dino" from Metro might come closest in terms of flavour—the semi classical bits, the Hindi-Urdu lyrics by Sandeep Srivastava (the song takes a lovely break when it goes 'Mushkilaasan kardo'). The visuals playing against the song are a bit like Metro, too, which was structured around loosely interconnected stories.