Tl:dr: Aanchal Srivastava, singer-songwriter, based in Mumbai, talented. She’s technically proficient, a great vocalist, and she’s been in the scene for some time now. Her new song is called ‘Nadan Dil’, features fellow musician Vidhya Gopal and features everything you’d enjoy in a great song; good vocals, good writing and good instrumentation. This avoids a trap that almost every song in the genre falls into, which is being insincere. We’ve heard this music throughout Bollywood and almost every stream of corporate entertainment for more than two decades. This waterboarding of content has given many people a kind of apathy; if it sounds like this song, it’s fake and boring. Not here, though.

Giving ‘Nadan Dil’ the standard Western analysis of hooks, verses and melodies would yield relatively boring results. Hook is good, verses are good, performances are good too. Following that road, the bass sounds lovely, vocals are absolutely on point, the production is uber clean and the song maintains a nice, contemplative level of energy. But is that really the point? What this song does is highlight themes we have always loved in popular culture; love, longing, joy. But where Aanchal and Vidhya go off the beaten path is with how genuine and independent the song is. This is not a piece of music made for a cheesy movie sequence and a billion crores of A-list film revenue. This is a tune that takes the only thing we loved about Indian ‘pop’ folk-adjacent music of the last few decades, and that’s how it feels. It feels nice. That’s enough, especially in today’s world. Enough and more?