They’re among the most popular live music acts on India’s wedding circuit, but it took Punjabi electro-folk duo Hari & Sukhmani, who formed towards the end of 2008, a good 16 years to release their debut album, 2024’s Modern Punjab. At first, the pair were so busy going from one live show to the next, that the thought of putting out an album didn’t even cross their minds. At one point, they were playing 200 gigs a year, including “days when we’ve done a lunch in Mumbai and a dinner in Delhi”, says Sukhmani. Now, they’ve intentionally given Modern Punjab the subtitle “Vol. 1” as they’re hoping to make it into a series. “Our management pushed us, so we said, ‘Okay, let’s just put a few songs together, release them and see what happens,’” says Sukhmani. “If things go well, we have a whole bunch [in the bank].” Hari says it was “quite easy” choosing which tunes from their vast repertoire to include on the collection, starting with the September 2024 promotional single “Madhaniya”, which was timed for release ahead of the wedding season. “Jutti Kasoori” and “Mirza Saiba”, on the other hand, were selected because they fall into the “storytelling zone”. The duo also aimed to offer something new in every song. “The way we’ve presented ‘Beriaan’ and ‘Kali Teri Gut’ is completely different from what we’ve done in the past,” says Hari. To add carefully thought-out twists to the traditional material, they enlisted session musicians such as pianist Nipun Cheema, who plays the accordion on “Mirza Saiba”, and Australian cellist William Jack, who lends an extra touch of melancholy to “Jutti Kasoori”. The duo also worked with folk exponents, including esraj player Arshad Khan, to enrich the flavour of their syncretic sound. Below, Hari & Sukhmani take Apple Music through the making of each of the album’s eight tracks. “Flavours of Punjab” Sukhmani: “We started out as medley specialists. We were able to sing five different songs on the same backing track. ‘Flavours of Punjab’ came from there. We decided to club three songs together: ‘Madhaniya’, ‘Challa’ and a little bit of ‘Piya Re’. It used to be the track that played in the intro video for our live set. As it finished, a voice-over would say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Hari & Sukhmani!’ and then, boom, the show started.” “Madhaniya” Sukhmani: “[Our version of] ‘Madhaniya’ has pretty much stayed the same as it was in the beginning. The only thing that’s slightly different is the flute, which we got Ajay Prasanna to re-record.” Hari: “Whenever we perform ‘Madhaniya’, it creates a certain vibe. You see a certain look on grandparents’ faces. You see a few tears coming down from the bride’s parents’ eyes. There are these emotional moments. That hasn’t changed in the past 15 years. So we felt there’s absolutely no need to change the track.” “Beriaan” Hari: “‘Beriaan’ is a song Sukhmani’s mamas [maternal uncles] used to sing. It isn’t as well known as the other folk songs [on the album].” Sukhmani: “I introduced Hari to it.” Hari: “For ‘Beriaan’, I wanted to try something completely out of the box. The track has two different tempos. It starts with a half-tempo, then goes into a double, back to a half and into a double again. That was a conscious move to maintain the sweetness but also to give it that energy—to give it a release.” Sukhmani: “You know how you watch a TV series and it finishes at a point where you know there’s going to be another season? [The inclusion of ‘Jind Mahi’ towards the end] was to leave room for season two. We’ve been wanting to do ‘Jind Mahi’ for a long time but haven’t got down to it. We will end up making the full version.” “Awwal Hammad” Sukhmani: “This is the new opening for our live show.” Hari: “We thought ‘Awwal Hammad’ would make the perfect interlude.” Sukhmani: “What happens at weddings is that there’s a DJ or maybe family performances before we get on stage. The vibe is completely different. The BPM [beats per minute] is somewhere else. We have to bring everyone down to take them up again. So we were like, ‘Let’s start with some [Sufi] poetry by Waris Shah and let people take that in.’ It sets the tone for us to start the performance.” “Kali Teri Gut” Hari: “We have many different versions of ‘Kali Teri Gut’. None of them have been released, barring the [one we put out in] 2021.” Sukhmani: “We revisited it for the stage and were like, ‘We should release it.’” Hari: “This is almost like a remix. The idea was to give it a little more energy. Sukhmani always tells me that it’s a very playful song—which it is—but the music is quite intense. So we thought we’d do a more playful version.” “Jutti Kasoori” Sukhmani: “You can interpret ‘Jutti Kasoori’ in many ways.” Hari: “The very direct interpretation is that [it’s the story of a] woman who has got married and is walking to her in-laws’ village, where she’s going to be living, and her shoes are too small. She’s halfway there but has to turn back. Why is she turning back? Is the real reason that she doesn’t want to shift to someone else’s house?” Sukhmani: “I was thinking more about how, while growing up, most girls have these romantic ideas about what kind of guy they’ll end up with, and then they end up in a situation over which they have no control. You’re in this new household: Either it can be great—and even then, it’s still an adjustment—or it can be really bad. They could be abusive. Hari was like, ‘Let’s not make it too heavy.’ Our aim was for the track to have a sunset vibe. The music was created with that thought.” “Mirza Saiba” Sukhmani: “I studied [Indian] classical vocal [music] in college and when I was doing my master’s, one of my seniors was this woman who had the kind of voice that, when she sang, the entire department could hear her. She went on to become a big artist who goes by the name Miss Pooja. She was my introduction to ‘Mirza Saiba’.” Hari: “We’ve been working on this for five years. Some songs are very story-like and, unless you narrate the entire story, it doesn’t feel complete, but then you’re grappling with the question: ‘Should I make this a six-minute or eight-minute song when people don’t even have two minutes to spend listening to music?’ That’s really been the struggle with this track, but we managed to crack it in the end. Ninety-nine per cent of the versions of ‘Mirza Saiba’ you hear have a [bowed instrument called a] sarangi. [We were wondering how to take it] in another direction, which is musically relatable but fresh at the same time. That’s how [we included] the accordion. And it just worked.” “Paranda” Hari: “Sukhmani has always told me that I should have been in a boy band. I was like, ‘If not in a boy band, I’ll sing like them in this band’—though I did perform ‘I Want It That Way’ [by Backstreet Boys] for a competition in school.” Sukhmani: “This didn’t start out as an acoustic track, but we ended up at a point where Hari was okay with the song but I felt it wasn’t coming together. Finally, we decided to just keep it to our voices and guitar. This was among the first tracks for which we wrote English lyrics. People are singing those parts at our gigs, so we know they’ve been listening to them.” Hari: “If you look at the overall album, some songs are more folk-ish. Some, like ‘Jutti Kasoori’, are four by four, but ‘Kali Teri Gut’ and ‘Beriaan’ have a little bit of breaks and jungle. An acoustic tune completes the journey of a multi-genre album.”