Shreyas Is Still On a Trip Through Indian Rap’s Frontiers

Mumbai-based, Pune-bred hip-hop artist Shreyas Sagvekar, part of the millions-streamed, globally-pumped jam “Taambdi Chaamdi,” still believes in the power of starting small.  

He’s been hosting Shreyas’ Living Room listening sessions with fans—first in 2021 in Pune at his own home and then in studio spaces in 2024 in Pune and Mumbai—which resumed once again in February and April this year.  

He says, “The whole setting revolves around what it would be like if I invited you over to my house: we’d just sit around, chill and talk random shit. That’s the base. I do that because it helps me connect with my fans on a very close level. I play a lot of unreleased songs, talk to people who are coming for the first time and might be new to Living Room.” It’s intimacy and exclusivity in one go, with the multilingual artist sometimes playing newly written hooks and giving fans insights into how an artist’s mind functions.  

Shreyas also gets a chance to play his older English rap from 2016 onwards, considering a lot of his fan base only grew in the last two years after he teamed up with DJ-producer Kratex to drop the Marathi house-meets-rap banger “Taambdi Chaamdi” in 2024 He says, “I want to tell fans that the Shreyas they know right now is a very confident person, who hustles and gets shit done, but I want people to know where it comes from.”  

Offbeat methods: Just under a decade ago when he started out, Shreyas was at rap battles like B3 in Mumbai, cutting his teeth battling seasoned rappers like EMF, performing at gig series Trap House Delhi and releasing English songs on YouTube. “I was just crossing [into] teenager years and finding my voice,” he recalls. He created his own calling card, #itsatrip to stand out. In May 2020, just as the pandemic had taken over, he released his EP Bring Back the Flower Boy but not via streaming platforms.  

Shreyas asked people to buy his eight-and-a-half-minute, four-track EP for ₹69 and got nearly a hundred buyers. Originally considering himself “anti-music business” (“I thought it would mean changing my sound”), he found he could strike a balance when it came to releasing music and finding a market for it. “If you’re innovative enough, you can always market what you’re doing. When Bring Back The Flower Boy came out, I thought this is doable. If you can do 10,000 [sales], you can of course do 10 lakh. You just have to figure it out,” he says.  

The punchline: That business acumen also extended to on-ground activities. Shreyas’ Living Room sessions in 2021 were a ball, considering he also got his brother (a chef) to cook up snacks. Starting out with just a handful of friends and fans, there’s now a cap of about 40 attendees at his sessions. In addition to the music, he also regularly unleashes bad jokes on unsuspecting fans. “At the last one, I told a joke about Drake is bad at math and can’t do addition. People said ‘Why the fuck?’ I said, ‘Because he tells 21 Savage, ’21 can you do sum for me?’” Shreyas says with a straight face. 

Laying out a plan: In an age where the common consensus is to drop a song every 45 days, Shreyas is more into planning his releases. He found a peer like producer Vedang, whom he’s called “very formative” in finding his voice. They went on to release “Paristithi” in 2022, which was part of their tape Stop Bullshittin’ The Fans Vol. 1. Then came the seismic single “Uddhat,” making Shreyas and Vedang not just a hitmaker team, but also important figures in Marathi hip-hop. “I used to pick out songs I wanted to market properly, and others which I just wanted to put out without any marketing,” he says. From launch parties for singles to learning about playlisting and social media, it’s been a learning curve.  

In the fast lane: “Taambdi Chaamdi” with Kratex took Shreyas’ momentum and sped it up, but it took a year of planning. Once it came out in May 2024 and got pushed into the global limelight thanks to Dutch label giant Spinnin’ Records, Shreyas says life has “gotten really fast and really vast.” Kshmr remixed the track and even dropped it at Ultra Music Festival, one of the largest EDM gatherings in the world. Most recently, Shreyas made his film soundtrack debut on “Marji Cha Maalik,” with composer Jakes Bejoy, for the 2025 action-thriller Deva starring Shahid Kapoor. “I feel like life has changed in an enabling way. I’m doing twice the amount of work I was doing before and the work has also gotten diverse,” he says.  

Not taking it personal: A year after his biggest hit, Shreyas says he’s learned to dissociate from the things he can’t stress on, namely the idea that artists are often reduced in the public consciousness to one song. “I try not to take it personally,” he says. He’s come a long way from the few hundreds who paid to buy his music, but he’s still focused on growing with his fans. “There are 26 or 28-year-old fans but also 18-year-old fans who come to the Living Room sessions, who listen to the songs I made when I was a teenager. It becomes very homely and wholesome and lets me connect.”