From defiant celebrations of selfhood by Hanumankind to Arpit Bala’s finessed new bop and comebacks by The Down Troddence, here are the releases that stood out this year
Hip-hop stars like Karan Aujla and Hanumankind made global leaps, the likes of Parvaaz, Sijya and Sen gave us beautifully bleak albums and the year belonged to those who pushed boundaries of language and genre
On his fifth album, the Mumbai rap star’s collaborations shine the brightest but he clearly prefers doing most of the heavy lifting himself, with varying results
Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and rock classics got fists pumping, as did a surprise performance of "Big Dawgs" with Hanumankind
From viral dance records and messy rap tracks to quiet break-up songs that hit at 2am, these were the Bollywood songs that lived everywhere in 2025
From pairing Diljit Dosanjh and Hanumankind to Reble rapping on an R.D. Burman classic to powerful tracks by Madhubanti Bagchi and Simran Choudhary, Bollywood has a new hit OST
Once seen as a regional outlier, South India is now shaping India’s hip-hop story with its languages, diversity, and hunger for originality
The British artist enlists Arijit Singh, Karan Aujla, Jonita Gandhi, Hanumankind, Dhee and Santhosh Narayanan to shape adaptive and boundary-blurring pop
After opening for the British pop artist on his recent India tour, Gandhi joins the likes of Karan Aujla and Hanumankind for an upcoming remix EP, set to release on Oct. 17, 2025.
As budgets rise and stages grow, the questions are about vision, access, and who decides the picture.