Fast-rising Punjabi singer Rashmeet Kaur is keen on eclectic sonic exploration
The Indian Summer Festival performer, who has collaborated with Major Lazer and contributed to Bollywood soundtracks, has forged some creative links to Canada’s West Coast
Rashmeet Kaur
As part of Indian Summer Festival, Rashmeet Kaur performs at the Vancouver Playhouse on July 11 at 7 pm
WE MAY BE long past the era of 24-hour music-video channels on cable TV, but when it comes to marketing music in the 21st century, video as a medium is arguably even more influential than ever, thanks to the global reach of platforms such as TikTok and YouTube.
Case in point: Angine de Poitrine. On paper, the Quebec duo’s out-there brand of instrumental prog played on microtonal guitars seems like something tailored for a niche audience of math-rock geeks. When a live performance captured on video by KEXP went massively viral, it turned the world on the band’s jaw-dropping prowess—and the costumes didn’t hurt either. The result? Angine de Poitrine is booked solidly from now until December, playing sold-out rooms and festival stages from here to Japan.
Rashmeet Kaur discovered the power of a high-quality live-performance video herself when her debut full-length album, Kaura, was released to a response that she considered underwhelming. The 2024 album should have been a slam dunk. The New Delhi-based singer was already a rising star thanks to her many Bollywood soundtrack contributions, to say nothing of being a featured vocalist on Major Lazer’s Grammy-nominated 2020 LP, Music Is the Weapon, alongside such heavyweights as Nicki Minaj and French Montana.
Kaura garnered the Punjabi singer good reviews and even a Rolling Stone India cover feature, but having spent three years crafting the record in collaboration with 10 producers and 30 artists from all over her home country and as far afield as Canada (Toronto rapper Fateh) and France (Paris-based emcee Tracy De Sá), Kaur had hoped the project would make more of an impact.
“The result was not as I expected, and I was not ready to say goodbye to my album, so toward the end of the year—which was September, October—I picked four songs out of those 12 songs and made live renditions of them,” Kaur says, reached on tour in New York City. “I made a live session out of it, which is called Kaura Live Sessions. And that was received so well from the audiences that they went back to listen to my original project. That made me happy, and then people started expecting those live sessions from me.”
To date, Kaura Live Sessions has racked up more than a million views on YouTube, and it prompted the singer to similarly revisit tracks from her debut EP, 2019’s Musafir, which is deeply rooted in Punjabi folk in contrast to the global hip-hop influences that informed Kaura.
Kaur credits her success on YouTube with allowing her to undertake her first North American tour, including a stop in Vancouver, which she describes as her “favourite city in the world”. And while she has yet to perform here—she’ll do that for the first time at the Playhouse as part of Indian Summer Festival—she has visited twice and she has forged some creative links to Canada’s West Coast.
These connections include Surrey-based Pakistani-Canadian producer Asad “Khanvict” Khan; Kaur sang on “Devotion”, a 2023 track Khan produced with Punjabi-American violinist Raaginder. Khan will, in fact, be opening Kaur’s show with a set by his own Sammah Project, which blends influences from Indian classical music and Sufi devotional songs into a modern electronic sound.
Chin Injeti
Another local collaborator is Pranam “Chin” Injeti, the Juno- and Grammy-winning songwriter and producer known for his work with DJ Khalil, Drake, Eminem, and others. Kaur encountered the former Bass Is Base member thanks to her New York–based manager’s involvement with a songwriting camp.
“The first time they did the camp, they invited me,” Kaur recalls. “They wanted to have an Indian artist on board. So they got me on board, and that’s when I met Chin for the first time. And then after that, when I came to Vancouver the next time, which was last year, I thought we should definitely link up and make some more music. So that’s what happened.”
Whatever Kaur and Injeti are cooking up hasn’t been released yet, but she seems thrilled with the results.
“They are bangers, trust me,” she says. “I ended up making three different songs in a week with Chin, and one of them is a complete pop electronic dance track. The second is a very slow, romantic number with guitars and a lot of light instrumentation on it. And the third track is proper folk elements fused with a lot of harmonies, a bunch of groovy elements in it. So, we covered all kinds of genres.”
Consider that eclecticism a signpost to Kaur’s future musical direction—or directions, plural, as the case may be.
“I’m absolutely down to expand my music and sounds, when it comes to satisfying my soul, because I really believe in experimenting,” she says. “I never want to repeat what I did in the past. I always want to bring something different to the table, something that has never been done. So I’m always keen on achieving something new with every project that I do, whether it’s fusing Japanese elements in the future, or maybe Korean artists, or collaborating with the people from Mars, maybe. You never know.” 
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