“It’s so reductive, the way I’m placed in the music industry. Even in certain playlists, like ‘Listen to these South Asian artists’, [as if] all of us from the diaspora who make wildly different music are underneath one umbrella,” says Indian-American artist Raveena Aurora.
With her day just dawning in California, she’s speaking from her home in Los Angeles, discussing how her upcoming album, Asha’s Awakening can hopefully separate her from the genres previously associated with her music. Skipping through disco, rock, pop while borrowing elements from R&B, jazz and soul, she shows off a looser and more pensive sound, skating confidently between genres without sounding disjointed. When Raveena sees how her music is described in publications – especially when being compared to other South Asian emerging pop stars, like Joy Crookes and Priya Ragu – she admits to finding it “really lazy and reductive. All three of us have such distinct sounds,” she quips. “It’s funny how we’re described in the same way and it’s all lumped into one thing.”