“Following you / Down this rabbit hole / It’s dark and empty like my hollow soul” sings Ishani on her pitch-perfect new single ‘Perfect Life’. It’s a tongue-in-cheek psychedelic allegory of the mind-bending sinkhole of social media where perceptions of life are distorted and distended in a house of mirrors.
Built on a thick psychedelic groove, the production is a psychotropic fen of rippling keys, R&B harmonies, trip-hop attitude, and Ishani’s scorching delivery. Her lyrics are anything but as hollow as the ‘Gram fantasies they portray. She channels the disorientation of a speaker lost deep in the deceptive matrix of social media. The song is, in her words, “a story about our collective social media experience and our relationships with our own phones. Whether we want to or not, we are constantly seeing other people’s lives, fantasising about what their world is like, and wasting our own time constantly scrolling, not living, just imagining other people’s lives.” Like the previous EP single ‘Ghosting My Soul,’ ‘Perfect Life’ draws on themes of self-isolation and the erosion of selfhood that comes from being isolated this year.
Since 2018, Ishani’s music drops have each successively rained her raw heartfelt vocals and atmospheric, future thinking beats on us.“Insomnia” made her a BBC Introducing Artist and in 2019 she performed at Reading and Leeds Festival, where her much-lauded single “Nothing’s Changed” stormed the festival crowd. Ishani’s songs take the surfaces, reflections and tribulations of modern life and cast them through the prism of Ishani’s introspective voices.
Not shy of big topics, Ishani engages with things our culture still finds difficult to talk about. ‘Don’t Stop The Fight’ tackles violence against women, while ‘Dark Angel’ reflects on the loss of two of her close friends to suicide. It was described by CLASH as “a highly personal plea for mental health awareness.” Ishani has performed at Hungary’s Sziget, one of Europe’s largest music and cultural festivals, and she’s also opened for Icelandic electro group Gus-Gus at Be My Lake Festival.
Her work is a synthesis of influences, inspired by her cosmopolitan upbringing and travels through Bangalore, Cornwall and Singapore. She is currently based in London.
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