New Delhi’s Swati Bhatt is a vocalist who has put a lot of time and training into her trade. She’s trained at SAM, practiced multiple forms and styles of music. Her new single ‘Veiled’ is also composed and arranged by her, but the focus of this laid-back and sparse song is squarely on her singing voice, and that provides more than enough interest on its own.

The track is even mixed to make sure every nuance or vocal touch is impossible to miss. Every harmony or lead is loud and slap-bang in the centre of the mix. The accompanying drums, bass, piano and guitar still find space to subtly do their thing; the clarity of everything in spite of the arresting vocal is the mark of a decent mix. The background instrumentation, however, does not necessarily do much in terms of driving the song forward or inducing transitions with volume or intensity. Everything follows Swati’s vocals. She pretty much leads the track by herself.

And it sort of makes sense when you listen to the songwriting elements on ‘Veiled’. There’s barely a second where there is only one isolated voice; Swati uses layers of herself to play the roles of string section, background vocals, swells and changes in intensity you would usually see different sections of an orchestra doing. Need a repeating ‘bassline’ in the beginning with quiet, building long notes to support the lead vocal? Sure, no problem; she just does all that on her own. There are areas where the background instrumentation is given space to shine while she goes for a more lonely delivery, and these are often pleasantly surprising moments. There are some nice parts where a bit of a bass or guitar comes to the fore for a short time, and while one would wish those bits were more pronounced, her vocal chops make up for it. Swati has a versatile but well-controlled voice, and she shows a lot of range on this track. Her voice swirls, twists, turns and sometimes is simply plain, taking the lead and being a solid background at pretty much every point on the track’s five-ish minute runtime.

The track is first and foremost a show of vocal prowess, and it certainly is that. There is definitely an argument for the song not having much more to it than that, but if you’re listening to ‘Veiled’ and wondering why there are so many layers of lush singing and vocal gymnastics where a bunch of produced instruments would have sufficed, maybe you’re thinking about it wrong.