Native to the San Francisco Bay Area and brought up in a “fanatically art-centred, immigrant household”, Sheherazaad has recently released her mini album Qasr that is now available on all major streaming platforms.

Her contemporary voicing, though inherently genre-defiant, may be described as alternative folk or experimental ballad. Sheherazaad’s original lyricism modernises certain existing Hindi-Urdu poetic forms, channelling questions of displacement, mother tongue, imagined homelands, and beyond.

Luminous, eccentric orchestration ebbs and flows through the record like a bioluminescent ocean, alongside quiet textural elements: a trickle of water, a ticking clock, ghostly whispers, twinkling manjira.

Singing in a delicate, chiffon vocal which defies genre and expectation — satirically hymnlike, then an erratic vibrato — Sheher’s poetic lyrics about marginalised genders and imagined homelands pour out over lush, enlivened instrumentation. There is no one way to behold the magnetic Qasr. “This may sound like some kind of third-culture reclamation,” she muses, before pausing, “Or it could just be like, you know, new-age, contemporary American folk.”

‘Koshish’ (which means ‘try’ in English), is a track about ageing that brims with infatuation and nostalgia for people or places. “It’s a way of paying homage to my Californian upbringing, revamping the surfer genre with brown beach bodies and hidden Oud as the axis of the song.” In the slow-burning, velvety ‘Khatam’ (“Finished”), live piano melts around harmonised voice layers, as she sings of time, clashes of civilizations, and apocalypse. Here, she weaves a warped fable about a feminine traveller journeying through epochs, stumbling upon alien lyrical terrain that has rarely been sung through a brown femme gaze.

Read the full story that first appeared in Global Indian here: