If you ever thought that the endlessly groovy modern blend of neo-soul, hip-hop and jazz-adjacent music has slowed down since it took off into the stratosphere some years ago, Pink Moss out of Goa is a band that will reinforce the fact that it’s only getting more and more fun here in 2024. Here’s a 4-piece band that incorporates a comical number of influences by its lineup alone, so it’s no surprise that the tunes on offer here are equal parts sonically surprising and expertly made.

The members: Sampriti Dastidar on vocals (we’ve written about her before; she does everything from compose to write to DJ, and she works in almost every conceivable genre), Souvik Bhattacharya on bass, Subid Khan on guitar (you know these two from another multi-genre juggernaut, Many Roots Ensemble), and Siddharth Rajmohan on drums (jazz whiz). A recommendation to go listen to their music would basically write itself at this point, because any coming together of musicians with such rich bodies of work usually guarantees great material. Except that’s not always the case. Bands like this live and die on the chemistry between their members, but luckily, Pink Moss has even that in spades.

These four have only released three singles as a unit so far, but they are more than enough to make a pretty strong case for a band to keep an eye on. First up is ‘KENIGOL’, one of Sampriti’s songs from her solo career but reimagined in a band context. It retains the Afro-pop grooves and vocals sung in Assamese from the original, but it adds a finesse and instrumental class that only such a band could. Then there’s ‘Xathor’, which is basically an Indian indie Hiatus Kaiyote song, but we’re not complaining one bit. It’s only fair to expect top-notch performances from all involved, but the quality of writing is something that often falls flat in this discipline; not here, though. The chords! Most recently, they put out ‘Shapeshift’, a journey through neo-soul ideas with a couple nods to dub and noodle-y modern jazz that definitely isn’t the easiest thing to get into. Once you do, though, it’s pretty difficult to stop putting a solid amount of wear and tear on the replay button.

The cool thing about Pink Moss is that they walk an interesting tightrope between two movements. One of them is the obviously instrumentally dense and clean pop music informed by modern soul and funk from the last decade, and the other is the collaborative ‘genre’ of indie music that comes out of musicians from different musical backgrounds working together. In a way, this is the best of both worlds, as it involves creative minds from a scene they are familiar with but open enough to let their styles bounce off each other. The result is very exciting indeed.