Hot and homegrown at Lolla ‘26
Editor’s note: As the music festival season nears—with the announcement of the Lollapalooza lineup still fresh on our minds—we’ve pulled together a list of Indian indie artists we think are worth checking out.
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A festival lineup doesn’t quite hit until there’s a chorus of boos and groans accompanying it. Like clockwork, the lineup announcement for Lollapalooza India (to be held in Mumbai, January 24–25) was met with ritualistic disappointment and anger. Only Linkin Park? This Linkin Park? Who is Playboi Carti? And so on and so forth.
Contrarians that we are, we decided to take a radically different approach. Here, we pick out a handful of artists from the lineup that we’re excited about, whose music moves us.
Trance Effect—from Dimapur, Nagaland—are just loads of fun. They make purposeful pop music with undertones of indie rock and some good old ’80s synths. Iuli Yeptho, the singer, drives the pieces forward with her powerful vocal delivery, crafting wonderful melodies within conventional structures—with an able band behind her. And her charismatic and effortless ability to connect with audiences elevates their powerful live shows a step further.
Excise Dept (right from the name itself) is an experiment in weirdness. The music is hard to pin down: it’s hazy and fluid, bouncing between languages and styles. One moment, there’s staccato Punjabi rap, the very next it’ll swing to lush ambient soundscapes or a folksy departure. Sab Kuch Mil Gaya Mujhe Vol 1, their 2024 album, confronts the realities of identity, racism, generational trauma—all floating under a fog of wild experimentation with sound and an ironic detachment. It’s all very confusing, and it all seems to work, right down to their “government-core” aesthetic and goofy sense of humour.
There’s a slow burning quality to Sijya’s music. The Delhi-based producer-composer builds themes of gentle melancholia and nostalgia through her foggy textural work—the melodic interplay simmers underneath, building steam as each piece develops. On top rests her searching voice; an understated delivery that skirts around the mix every now and then. Live, the music transforms: the synths and strings take on a life of their own, bouncing off against each other, forming a colossal audio blob under open skies that her voice holds together.
Who doesn’t love some metal tikka masala on their plate every now and then? Bloodywood, the Delhi folk-metallers, have a very cool thing going on. They have dhols and sarangis and all those sounds of our childhood—the spices—marinating inside a ruthless heavy metal spine. The band has a clear gimmick, drawing on traditional Indian folk and classical elements and launching into aggressive, almost threatening metal journeys. The music has enough novelty to catch the average metalhead off-guard, but it also offers substance; a sharp understanding of fusion that goes beyond tokenistic crowbarring of east-west dynamics. And their live shows, which stages across the world have been witness to, are electrifying; at this point, they’re bordering on becoming global cult heroes.
Imagine a guy 10 feet off the ground, in the middle of a piercing scream that echoes through the air, before returning back to earth and rattling off a series of angsty non-sequiturs. As the guitars chug away at breakneck speed. That’s your average Pacifist show. The Mumbai post-hardcore band are a total riot: people screaming, jumping around, pacing through songs, never missing a note. The songs are frantic and dynamic, with a clear sense of melody holding forth underneath the madness. The energy on stage is electric. The punk rock spirit, of course, is eternal.
What else is left to say about Karsh Kale? The man is a certified legend of the indie scene in India (among other worlds), forever finding new modes of expression and performance. While best known for playing the tabla, limiting Kale’s impact in that way would be a grave disservice. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, a producer, a cutting edge composer, and someone who’s managed to carve a space for himself in every discipline of music he’s entered. There’s an unafraid, almost reckless insistence on finding and crossing new boundaries, whether it’s his work on the seminal Tabla Beat Science, his Coke Studio forays, film music, electronica, and on and on.
Here’s a Spotify playlist featuring Indian artists playing at Lollapalooza 2026.
souk picks