Sijya Is A Hater and Proud of It

In between sunny and overcast skies in Bengaluru, Sijya debates whether to keep her sunglasses on inside a café. To the New Delhi artist’s credit, we’re sitting in a bright corner and have just ordered our beverages, so it makes sense — though she’s also aware it might draw attention. She’s already got her college friend and filmmaker/photographer Bhushitendu filming for a documentary, as I pick her brain on everything from her India tour to promoting her new EP, Leather & Brass.

“I made a ‘Hater’ T-shirt, but we’re [sold] out. It was just a small sample of 10. I gotta makes the monies. Oh wait, merch is actually a loss-making thing,” she says at some point in our half-hour-long conversation. Her newsletter is called “Hate Mail” and she says she hates touring (“But I want to be touring a lot for because I hate myself, I guess,” she adds). She sums up the artist mindset as “we just like to hate ourselves.” Yet, Sijya is only getting a lot of love in India and abroad for being a powerful sonic storyteller who dives into the abstract on Leather & Brass.

The composer, producer, vocalist, and graphic designer has just wrapped up a short tour and is now heading to the U.K. for two shows, including Tate Modern Lates in London on Sept. 26, 2025, and Jazz Café alongside British selector Auntie Flo on Oct. 23, 2025. Later in January 2026, she’s headed to Lollapalooza India in Mumbai.

Even when her debut EP Young Hate came out in December 2022, Sijya was going places—she’d supported the likes of Cinematic Orchestra at their tour organized by Echoes of Earth Festival and ticked Magnetic Fields Festival off her list as well. At the time, Sijya didn’t think she’d be a musician at all. “I think the music stuff, whenever I started doing it, was definitely getting more attention than graphics anyway, because graphics is like a service,” she says.

Now, with Leather & Brass, there’s a lot more commitment to the craft. Visuals shot by photographer/filmmaker Shiva Ahuja as well as artist Tito distinctly represent Leather (the intimate video for the lumbering track “Tabla”) and Brass (the trippy, melancholic yet soulful “Do I Know”), respectively. “I think this EP, I’ve been told, has got a calming and unnerving kind of vibe. I’m happy with that. That’s fine. That’s a good description,” she nods and says.

While Young Hate was more angsty, there’s an open-endedness to lyrics on Leather & Brass, in which Sijya says one of her current favorite lines is: “Am I too much” from the slow-burning, cinematic opening track “I Only Want To Crash.” “Maybe I’ll hate it after this interview,” Sijya says drolly. Songs like “Rust” take you to surreal downtempo corners of Sijya’s composing mind, where the vocal melodies feel more like an instrument and less like anything you need to look up to understand the intent.

While she was working on the six-track EP with audio engineer Jay Panelia for a couple of years, it wasn’t necessarily full steam ahead. A big push came when One Little Independent Records (which has been home to experimental auteurs like Björk) signed Sijya to release Leather & Brass, which she calls a “very affirming thing.” She says, “It gave some structure and stability to the whole thing, and like a bit of hope.” Sijya pauses, sips on her drink, and reflects on this for a while because she feels like she’s not summed it up accurately. “There’s very little bits of hope floating around that you have to catch. And then sometimes it keeps you going for six months, and then you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, nothing’s happening.’ Then something happens and it gives you energy to go on for another six months,” she says.

One Little Independent Records came to her via Asian Underground pioneer Talvin Singh, whom Sijya was working with after the tabla artist and producer had begun splitting his time between New Delhi and the U.K.

Singh’s longstanding connection to the folks at One Little Independent—he’s even played on Björk’s stellar album Debut—led him to play her music to them. It helped that Sijya already had some footing established in the U.K. since Young Hate was out via Accidental Records, and had played as a supporting act for genre-bending artists like Nabihah Iqbal. Sijya says, almost a little too understatedly, “I feel like there is a scene there that I do want to kind of show face and, if not be a part of.”

In September 2024, after meeting with Singh again and knowing One Little Independent had shown interest in her music, Sijya invited label reps to her show at Café Oto, a 300-capacity mainstay venue that was sold out. “It was probably my most important gig, because I knew these label heads were there. But it was also not easy to sneak them into the guest list. They wanted to buy tickets also, but it was sold out by then. I managed to squeeze them in somehow.” Her in-ear monitors stopped working before she got on stage, so Sijya was just going old-school, through the monitors. It went off well, and two days later, she was at the One Little Independent office, playing them Leather & Brass, even though there was an informal understanding that she would release it via Accidental. The latter gave her “the blessing” to go ahead with One Little Independent, understanding that it was a bigger move for her. “They were very encouraging of me moving on, which was very emotional. I found that to be very sweet,” Sijya says.

It’s a far cry from the kind of support one might get in India. Sijya cynically recalls how an Indian label was originally in talks to release Young Hate and then “got upset” because she got a deal with Accidental. “It was like way better than what they [Indian label] could have offered. But they were upset,” she says.

As she fetches the vinyl of Leather & Brass to give to me, the question that comes to mind is about the artwork. Thematically, the songs and sounds see Sijya draw from the concept of decay, among other things. She and Panelia put synths and drum machines through old guitar pedals like the Big Muff, a Seymour Duncan Twin Tube, Moog Minifooger, and then put the recordings back in their digital audio workstation.

When she was looking through old photos, she found one of her dad’s cars. It had whitener scrawled on it, and Sijya explains this was her trying to erase green decorative tape that her dad had originally stuck on the car for the photoshoot. It’s now become a glow-in-the-dark feature on the vinyl cover. On the back of the vinyl, there’s a photo of baby Sijya with all her dolls and a tape deck. “That’s also so Indian, like, all the expensive dolls are inside the box,” she says with a laugh. What did her dad think of the fact that this photo is now her cover art? “He thought the car company was going to sue me; he was very worried. He still is,” she says.

The cover itself seems destined to build a cult following — a testament to how Sijya’s design eye transforms even a family photograph into an object of global resonance. It’s another side of her we might see when she performs at Lollapalooza India 2026 in Mumbai in January. She rejected the idea of pitching a backing band to perform with her. “I don’t want to do that right now, because, first of all, it doesn’t feel authentic. All of this music is made on my laptop by me. I’ve made every single part, and then now to have all these people playing it out, it feels very fake,” she says. She can’t do much with visuals, given it’s the daytime slot, but she’s working on a stage design plan and is seeking collaborators. And working on new music. This time, it’s taking a different direction. “The new stuff is rage-ier,” she says with a smile.