Mr Viral
From human pyramids in Martin Garrix and Arijit Singh’s ‘Weightless’ to BombayMami shredding slopes in a lehenga for ‘Fire in Delhi’ to OAFF’s immersive ‘Between Flowers’ album experience, a new wave of directors is redefining the music video
There’s a visceral moment in the opening seconds of the music video for Martin Garrix and Arijit Singh’s “Weightless” that feels gut-wrenching yet impossible to look away from. A group of Govindas (participants in the Dahi Handi celebration of India’s Janmashtami festival) stacked in a human pyramid formation comes tumbling down—folding into each other like a Jenga tower gone awry. It’s a scene shot in slow motion, where time hangs suspended in the air as the gravity of its impact washes over you. And yet, the way it’s captured doesn’t cast you as a spectator to collapse. Instead, it evokes a stirring feeling of resilience—a sense that even in the defeat of a fall, there’s the triumphant promise of rising again. And that’s exactly what director Bijoy Shetty wanted viewers to feel.
Conceptualized by his friend, assistant director Darryl Das, Shetty drew on memories of the “badass” Dahi Handi festivities he grew up watching in Chunabhatti, Mumbai. He never intended for the crash to feel like a stunt—he wanted it to land like a punch, not a performance. “Dahi handi is always shown in a particular way: someone is tying a bandana, or spinning around, or a dhol is playing. But nobody shows them fall,” he says, explaining that though it happened by accident, he was mesmerized by the way the cascading crash unfolded in the final footage. “The way they fucking hurt themselves at that particular point and still want to engage in that sport either way…it’s just beautiful. It was such an intense thing that I really wanted to document it.”
Shetty’s ability to zoom out (probably in an overhead tracking shot) on these minuscule moments with profound nuance has likely led to his rise as one of the most compelling visual storytellers in India’s music industry. He brings the same observational eye to his recent video for rapper and close collaborator Hanumankind’s wildly viral “Run It Up”— a larger-than-life portrayal of some of India’s most culturally significant yet often overlooked martial art forms, from Kerala’s Kalaripayattu to Manipur’s Thang Ta.
Photo by Janmejaya Daroz
He’s also the driving force behind the “Big Dawgs” music video that helped catapult Hanumankind to one of the most globally streamed artists, showcasing stunt persons in the Maut Ka Kuan (Well of Death)—a dizzying carnival attraction where motorcyclists ride along steep vertical walls—in a way that seamlessly matched the track’s high-octane grit. “I don’t want to just make something which is a counter piece to the music. I want it to move with the music,” he stresses. When asked if he is on a mission to reframe unexplored Indian traditions through the lens of contemporary music, he shrugs. “There was no hunger [to spotlight underrepresented parts of Indian culture], per se, but there was a need to,” he explains. “Because I was like: why the fuck have we not seen a [music] video like this?”
Photo by Janmejaya Daroz
Shetty has emerged as something of a defining voice in the music industry’s rising wave of visual world-building, now an essential extension of an artist’s identity. The phenomenon of musicians as visual curators isn’t exactly new—from Bappi Lahiri’s glitzy gold chains, which became synonymous with his exuberant disco-fused Bollywood music, to the signature streetwear and tattoos that define Mumbai’s Gully rap scene. The now-disbanded Kolkata dream-pop duo Parekh & Singh built their identity around pastel-hued suits and Wes Anderson-esque symmetry, Usha Uthup made her trademark silk sarees and bindis as iconic as her deep voice, and AP Dhillon’s 360-degree levitating stage setup turned his performances into full-blown spectacles.
Whether through music videos, stage design, or even their personal style, an artist’s visual identity can help them create cultural moments and amplify their online and offline presence. And as we find ourselves in an overstimulated, image-obsessed world—where entire conversations can unfold through a simple exchange of photos, reels, or memes, and identity overlaps with the pressure to build a personal brand—musicians are almost expected to cultivate a strong aesthetic direction if they hope to make a mark.
Take the case of Swiss-Indian singer and creative director BombayMami. The teaser video for her single “Fire in Delhi,” which featured the artist shredding through Switzerland’s pristine snow-packed slopes in an ornate red lehenga while dropping fiery verses, got over five million views on Instagram. It made her an overnight viral sensation. With that, the artist, who has been making music videos since 2012, finally cemented her place in the industry as both a music personality and a style icon. “It’s the juxtaposition—where opposites don’t just co-exist, but also elevate each other,” she says when asked about what made her video resonate so much with people.
Interestingly, she was also heavily inspired by the imagery of iconic Bollywood movies like Chandni and Darr, which famously used the Swiss Alps as the backdrop for romantic song sequences featuring the heroines draped in vibrant sarees. “If you really look at it, Switzerland and India are like extreme opposites. Switzerland is calm, structured, and always on time. India is chaotic and just wild.” Growing up with an Indian father and a Swiss mother, the collision of these two worlds became her space for self-expression.
Photo by Morgan Layla Williams
Describing her signature aesthetic as “divine feminine, but also boss woman,” BombayMami further leans into these contradictions for the official music video of “Fire in Delhi.” Directed by Nayan Sharma, the video features her gleaming in gold finery, as her powerful sensuality is intercut with a traditional Kathak dancer and classical Indian musicians. “Many South Asians living in the West grow up with this mentality like we shouldn’t be too loud or imposing,” she says. “And I think I just don’t give a shit,” she says with a chuckle, pointing out that while she didn’t start out with the intention to flip the script of how South Asian women are perceived, the process of filming these videos allowed her to own her heritage in a deeper way.
Photo by Morgan Layla Williams
Digging deep into an artist’s sonic universe to craft a visual identity that truly reflects the music is at the heart of director Anurag Baruah’s approach. Earlier this year, he got a call from composer and producer OAFF to shoot some social media content for his album Between Flowers in Udaipur. But as they began collaborating, the project naturally evolved into something far more expansive: an immersive album experience, bathed in soft light, earthy tones, and a dreamlike atmosphere. “I like creating abstract visuals, and in the process of creating this 20-minute-long film, I found a lot of similar trends in OAFF’s music as well, which I caught on to for the visual identity,” says Baruah, emphasizing the importance of a compatible vision when a filmmaker and artist team up together.
Photo by Anurag Baruah
As the audience journeys through the album—from “Balmaa,” an electronic interpretation of a Hindustani classical composition featuring vocalist Divyam Sodhi, to “Falling,” a slow-burning blend of contemporary synths, Carnatic influences, and soaring vocals by Sid Sriram—they encounter Udaipur’s stained-glass windows, an interpretive Bharatanatyam performance by Maneesha Negi, and a mesmerizing reverse-motion petal shower. “We’ve seen the music space grow, and suddenly everybody’s looking to India, so I wanted to push out [the India story] in a beautiful way,” he says. “We have our grittiness, but we are also full of color. We have so much culture, and all of it is just oozing out because of how democratized content has become.”
Photo by Anurag Baruah
This democratization of content has fueled the shift towards a more integrated approach to music and visuals, empowering independent artists to explore new formats and narratives, even without the backing of major labels or large-scale production budgets. This new era of visual world-building isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about identity, belonging, and reclaiming narratives. As India’s artists dig into archives, both personal and cultural, they’re creating new ways to be seen and remembered.
For musician, singer, songwriter, and actor Kavya Trehan, viewing her sound through a visual prism wasn’t a calculated strategy, but a natural instinct. “I like to consume artists who create worlds, who pay attention to the mood of their music, the storytelling behind their lyrics,” she explains. “If I am not expressing the way I am consuming, that dissonance will be there. That sort of seamless audio-visual marriage is the only way you can really feel that art is taking place.” Describing her aesthetic as a “retro futuristic shaman that loves the thin line between immersion and abrasion,” the multihyphenate has always found ways to express her music through the visual medium. Right from her early releases like “Underscore” and “Golden,” she has worked closely with her sister, artist Khyati Trehan, and art director Sanchit Sawaria to cultivate her signature visual world.
Photo by Shitabh Pillai (KAVYA Live at EXT)3
But her most ambitious effort so far has been her Hyperreal Tour, a multi-sensory live experience that plays with immersive visuals, movement, and introspective storytelling. Conceptualized by Trehan and Sawaria, the Hyperreal Tour is built around Kavya’s album Know Me Better, which has been years in the making. “When they [Khyati and Sanchit] heard my mixes, they said, ‘This sounds like something that’s excavated so you discover it because there are so many natural sounds, but there’s so much simulated musicality.’ And then they created this whole concept that feels like archeological discoveries of what you would sound like, or what our world could be like centuries from now, when we were unearthing it.” For Kavya, this interpretation hit the nail on the head—after all, these were indeed her archaeological sounds. She also wanted audiences to leave her shows with some physical evidence of being part of it, leading to a jewelry merch line that echoed the sonic themes of her album. “If [the tour] is about archaeological discoveries, [I asked myself] what would be the tactile evidence? When you walk into a gallery and look at things, you feel something—because you’re seeing the tactile evidence of a time that was.”
Photo by Simone Gandhi
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