The Hidden Gems From India's Rap Scene

As a professional music critic, my inbox is always overflowing with new music—advance copies of major label albums pushed by corporate PR, indie artists sending me their new EPs, even demos from teenagers just starting out on their musical journey.

- Bhanuj Kappal

As much as I'd love to listen and respond to them all, there are only so many hours in the day. So I end up engaging in a form of triage, passing the emails, DMs and WhatsApp texts through a bunch of mental filters—have I heard this artist before? Is it in a genre that I usually write about? How much do I trust the friend or music publicist who recommended it to me?

It's a process that I've got down pat, and that I usually trust. But it's also not perfect. I know that, somewhere in that big digital archive of music that I haven't heard—or only sampled in passing—there are bound to be some records that might rock my world, if only I had made the time to check them out. So every once in a while, I like to spend a couple of days digging through my grab-bag of advances and demos, hunting for hidden gems that I couldn't get to in time, that found themselves lost in the shuffle.

On my last such deep dive, I found three. And so, instead of my usual column about one of the previous month's big ticket releases, I'm going to give them their moment in the sun, in the hope that they entertain and challenge you as much as they challenged me. They're all rap records—which tells you something about what the most exciting Indian music scene is these days—but they come from different parts of the country, and speak in different tongues.

The first record is Natya Alaapika, the latest full-length by Bhojpuri rapper and producer Shikriwal. There's very little info about Shikriwal available online—his first name's Sanket, he hails from Jharkhand, and he started dropping music in 2020, during the early pandemic. His debut mixtape—2020's