When Vancouver-based rapper and singer-songwriter Karan Aujla went into the studio with Ikwinder Singh (aka producer Ikky) in August 2022, they had no concrete plans. The two had known each other as fellow strivers in the Canadian Punjabi music scene since they were in their early teens. They’d even tried to make music together before—in India, in 2019—without much success. But this time, something was different. “As soon as we sat down, something connected, and it all just happened naturally,” Aujla tells Apple Music. “We came up with this idea and made this track ‘Admirin’ You.’ That’s where we realized that this is a great sound and a great direction we’re heading into. We decided to make more tracks in that direction, that genre, and make something new.” On Making Memories, Punjabi folk vocal melodies and desi lyrics blend seamlessly with a lush, expansive pop sound rooted in contemporary soul, R&B, and hip-hop. “I just want to change my whole catalog basically,” says Aujla. “I just think the world is changing, and we just need to bring in more Western stuff. In Punjabi [music], we need more of that.” While some tracks hew close to the aggressive, bars-heavy approach that Aujla’s fans expect of him, most of the songs on Making Memories showcase a gentler, more introspective side. “I wanted to keep it more on the positive and happy side,” he says. Here, Aujla talks through the album, track by track. “Girl, I Love You (Euro’s Intro)” “Every time I listen to that intro, oh my god! It feels like you’re driving, it’s 1:30 am. The whole album is just a ‘listen to at night’ type of thing. Because most of my studio sessions, I was working from 8 pm till 3 am. We made the whole album in that setting, so we kept that sound as well. That positive frequency. We named it ‘Euro’s Intro’ after my boy Euro, Jamal [Europe], on the project. He came up with this idea, and he decided to make that intro sound the way it does.” “What...?” “Ikky and I were in LA for something else, but we ended up in the studio as always. Ikky just played this beat, and I fell in love with that R&B sound. It reminded me of back in the day, like ’90s R&B, hip-hop type of vibes. I thought, ‘We’ve got to get a Punjabi track on this.’ We were just playing with it, and it became something. We decided to name it ‘What...?’ because we didn’t even know what it was. Like, ‘What?!’” “Admirin’ You” (feat. Preston Pablo) “Preston is our brother. I met him through Ikky and his team. The first time I actually saw him and heard him singing live was in a studio, when we made ‘Admirin’ You.’ We were humming, and he was freestyling, and we came up with this melody together. Then we told Preston to sing this line in Punjabi—‘kade mil ke baitho’ [‘sit together sometime’]—and he said, ‘I’ll try it.’ He sang it in broken Punjabi, but it sounded really nice. I was like, ‘If somebody who doesn’t know our language can sing it easily, then we should go with this hook.’ When I say, ‘dekho tare’an di lo,’ I’m basically saying, ‘Look at the stars.’ I was actually cruising in a Rolls-Royce in Toronto with Ikky. We had half the track written, but that line came from the idea that there were stars on the roof of the car, but there’s also stars out there.” “Jee Ni Lagda” “That sound came more from Bruno Mars, that type of vibe. There’s this saying that we like to use, the word ‘jatt’ in any song. But you would never really hear anyone talking about that desi or villager lifestyle on a beat like that. So, that was the motive: We wanted to create this Western pop sound, but you still talk about really paindu [rural] things. That was the attempt. So, when I sing, ‘Kude tere lyi mai change kita darji’ [‘Girl, I changed my tailor for you’], it’s so desi. You would never think of hearing the word ‘darji’ on a beat like this.” “Try Me” “That song, it’s just my style. It’s not even about the controversies or anything. I feel like ‘Try Me’ is just every Punjabi man, it’s just us. I always try to keep it relatable to Punjabis and still sound like me. But we never really did an old-school boom-bap beat like hip-hop [before], so we tried that combination on this one.” “Champion’s Anthem” “I tried to keep it as desi as I could. There’s lines like ‘Thonu kdr ki attea di dulle v ni hone/Tu ki bujegi hlaat dekhe chulle v ni hone.’ [‘You can’t know the value of flour if you didn’t experience when it gets dropped/How can you imagine what it was like, you would not even have seen a chulha.’] That’s a deep line, I think. There’s some people out here in Canada from our community who don’t even know what a chulha [traditional stove] looks like. We used to make food on that. So, talking about stuff like that on beats like this just made it really interesting. And that song is all about bars—it’s just bars, man.“ “Softly” “It’s so simple, and it’s such a storytelling song. It’s about a girl who is telling a lallari—a guy that colors your chunniyan [a long piece of cloth traditionally worn around the head, shoulders, and neck] in the market in India—‘Hey, can you dye my chunni the same color as my guy’s car?’ The chunni and the car, it’s just combining both the cultures. The girl is talking about, I wanna go get my hair curled for you—shit like that. But it’s more in a desi way.” “You” “We made this in Vancouver. Ikky and I had booked this studio. When we looked at the photos online, it looked pretty good. But when we went to the studio, it was literally a container cargo box. It was so small that four of us couldn’t fit in there. That will be with me forever—that was such a memory. I wanted to make the track from the girl’s perspective, where she’s expressing her love. That was the whole point.” “Bachke Bachke” (feat. Yarah) “That’s all my boys Jamal, [Kevin] Ekofo, and Sandy [Schwisberg] on the keys. Everybody together, with Ikky basically directing them. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible and have that key word in the hook. Everybody says, ‘Bachke bachke’ [‘Beware, beware’] in our language. It’s such a common word. It’s one of those cruise tracks, something you listen to while you’re driving. There’s those gang vocals on that, a lot of voices coming together on [the chorus]. I feel like it was the perfect track to end the album on.”