There’s something magnetic that happens almost a minute into a good Natasha Noorani song; you have to stop what you’re doing and look at your music app: What’s playing now? Who is that? What are the lyrics? How can I play this song on repeat until it is somehow bursting out of my pores? Why is this song all I hear now?

If you haven’t heard Natasha Noorani, you’ve almost certainly heard of her in the ether: a voice on a jingle, a feature on a track. She was one of the vocalists on the cover of Nahid Akhtar’s Yeh Aaj Mujh Ko Kya Hua from Baaji. There’s Natasha Noorani of the viral cover of Imran Khan’s Amplifier. There’s the Natasha Noorani who you know if you’ve been even slightly invested in Pakistani music for the last few years. Her musical career started far before she appeared onto a Spotify Wrapped playlist: she’s the co-founder of the Lahore Music Meet, she used to cover Tool - a rite of passage for any musician who came of age in the 2000s, she was in Biryani Brothers; there was the 2018 EP Munasib. Her work as an archivist, and with the Vinyl LP records store in Karachi, is the reason why some of you own a record player. And there’s Natasha Noorani, the musician: in a pink suit singing Baby Baby, pop girl personified. There’s the hits: Choro, Thandi, Faltu Pyar (with Hasan Raheem), the album Ronaq, a truly popular music album to its core. There’s a Boiler Room set. There’s Ahsan Khan vaguely recalling Natasha in an interview with Zoe Viccajee, a line now referenced in Natasha’s Haan, I know. There’s the Natasha Noorani who knows her references inside out — she is an archivist, with a collective called Peshkash. Natasha has already lived a few lives: corporate girl, music girl, festival girl, but this iteration of Natasha is not a new era, but a composite of all of that, ready to harness all the lessons learned from cleaning up jam rooms to festival marketing, culled from the history of Pakistani music in hard to find vinyls and cassettes, all to make her plan for global domination happen.

Natasha Noorani was born in 1992, the youngest of four children. She grew up in a house of adults, she says; her family loves embarrassing each other — Natasha once put mehndi in her hair, which turned the white strands in her hair orange, and then had to go to school like this. “In my O levels, I got okay grades; they weren't fantastic. But my family showed up with phoolon ke haar all the way to the inside of the school. They're very big on embarrassing each other, but especially me. Like, they're my biggest haters and my biggest fans, to ensure that I have a very balanced approach towards life.”

She went to Lahore Grammar School, briefly to Kinnaird College, and then to LUMS, and completed a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology at SOAS. She recently moved to a new apartment in Lahore that feels like an almost riotous moodboard of art and inspiration. It's almost too much to clock: there’s Safwan Subzwari’s work, the Maula Jatt in London album and a Munni Begum record, cookbooks, art featuring pomegranate motifs, woven chairs (“super cheap”, ordered from Bahawalnagar). She cooks; lately, she’s been into making tarts and pizzas. But mostly, what Natasha seems to be doing, is working.

She’s a full-time musician — in this economy — and so fully immersed in the world of not just creating music, but the whole product — the look, clothes, merch, the visuals, the marketing — that it’s hard not to get the sense that Natasha is doing the most. She’s buying fabric for her outfits for her music videos, which she’s making on the cheap. She’s at the printer’s shop getting boxes made for her EP release. She is rearranging the chairs in her room for this interview’s video crew and brewing coffee. She’s incorporating references from Pakistani musicians into her work, her songs, into the whole experience of being a musician; some on the nose, some so deeply layered that they need to be pointed out. It’s those samples and reference points and visuals that are making their way into the music she is making now.

There are no handlers, chotas, hovering managers watching from the side: it feels very much like being in the energy field of an involved person. Perhaps, you might even say, too involved, someone whose standards and expectations are sky-high; not, perhaps, from other people but herself, and that can often feel like a self-defeating proposition. Can you ever really win against yourself? But Natasha has been told no a lot, and — one gets the feeling — burned far too many times — that now that she’s in charge, it’s not easy to let go of it.

But for all this trial by fire, does it feel like Natasha is successful? From the outside, this is success — the recognition from her peers, from people like Bilal Maqsood, the fans. Once you have Imran Khan recognise your cover, what else matters?

“I mean, I feel like I'm still waiting for my definitive ‘made it’ moment, if that makes sense,” Natasha says. “While I am doing very well, I feel like my standards and my dreams are a bit too high and big. Baby Baby and Choro, I definitely consider a shift. That, for me, is the first time where I feel like all of my — what I call my early bachgana kind of music, like all the Munasibs and the English angst and everything coming out. I think those songs, in that era, which is 2020, 2021, really solidified a lot for me; I had to believe that I was a musician. That’s when I quit my job and I was finally able to say ‘Hi. I'm a musician. I am a singer. I am a producer.’”

While the feeling of walking onto a set on which she has control, or onto the set of Choro are markers, the definitive moment, she says, is yet to come. “I feel like Canada was insane.” [Natasha performed at the Luminato festival in Toronto in 2024.] “Canada really blew my mind, actually, this summer because it was my first time in North America, and like, 2,000 people were there to see me, and most of them knew all the words to my songs. And I was really overwhelmed by that. I was like, ‘Okay. This is not normal.’ And so I think that, for me, that was my season ender for this year, and the season that started after this summer was insane just because of that.”

By the time I meet Natasha Noorani in person in Lahore this year, 2024 is almost ending; and she, surprisingly — because it feels like her album Ronaq released just yesterday — has a new EP out: Club Sandwich — a local reference in and of itself, with merch to match: club sandwich boxes ala Rizwan Burger. “ This new EP is very fun. It is almost me healing from putting out Ronaq because that took me two and a half years. There was so much pressure for that first album. And it had to be very well thought out. And I'm happy with the way it turned out.” Club Sandwich, on the other hand, is what happens when Natasha doesn’t have the stress of an album, or the need to curate an experience around it.  “Everything is very on-the-go decision-wise, right from the very name of the EP, called Club Sandwich. I named it because I had to send the files over to someone, and I just needed a name, just a random title and I was like, haha, Club Sandwich.”

There’s Mithi Gal, a British garage beat-style song with Punjabi lyrics, Bolo Unhein, which is house music, but the standout is Nasha, an intoxicating gem of a song, which she describes as “very deeply Afro beats with Ah Ma piano.” It has the exact effect of a club sandwich: why are all these things happening at once, and how does this all somehow work?

“It was just very nice that they all pieced in together and I enjoyed listening to them a bunch. And they were my top three listened to songs on my phone of demos that I was going through, and I was like, nice, let's put it out.”

The question about Natasha’s music — and direction — at this point, at the cusp of the new year, is who is all this for? Who is listening to Natasha Noorani, and who is she making this music for?

I asked Zeerak Ahmed, the editor of Hamnawa, whose newsletter has now served since 2020 as the prime source on Pakistani music and criticism, and incidentally her husband— announced as a footnote in a newsletter (“now wife of the show”).  “Who do you think Natasha is making music for? Is it for the fans? Is it for herself? Is it for her peers?”

“It's a bit of everything, I think,” Zeerak said. “I think a lot of it is about self-satisfaction and pushing it forward, right? If there's someone that was just trying to get, you know, big numbers, they would make very different music than what she's doing. There seems to be an element of not trying to repeat herself; her big songs aren't really repeated multiple times, which suggests a very specific way of going about things. I think she surrounds herself in the music industry with people that push her artistic craft forward, and would therefore be kind of impressed by the work that she's coming up with. And so I think there's definitely that element as well, but it comes from a desire for professional improvement. And then, the audience is obviously there. She's trying to be a bit ahead of the audience, I think, where she's not clamouring to produce exactly what people are listening to, but she's reaching out to new people.”

Is she finding pockets of underserved fans (2000s kids who identify with Amplifier covers and Ahmed Jahanzeb homages, zillennials with electropop) and then tailoring her music for them, one drop at a time? If it were that easy, Natasha would have skyrocketed. But this isn’t an exact science, and anyone can sniff out inauthenticity easily, especially when it comes to music — over-manufactured work, a joke that's gone too far, a musician who needs to evolve. Mostly, what people connect to can be completely unexpected; it could be something wild, a retro element, the unexpectedness of a Dua Lipa song mashed up with a Abhijeet song for an SRK film from 1999; or Natasha’s feature on Umair’s album Rockstar without a Guitar. “[..] her being on Umair’s album is a totally different audience for her than it would be otherwise,” Zeerak says. “So this is an artist that is actively reaching out to new groups of people and trying to kind of understand what they're listening to as well.”

But that seems more about personal validation and what people in the industry think, than ‘I have a fanbase and I need to cater to that.’ “Not really,” Zeerak said. “Her fanbase - more so than most other fan bases-  is very dedicated. The relationship she's built with her own core fan base is very much about her journey, and it is built around this idea of her trying new things and, you know, taking her strengths - very strong vocal melodies - and combining them with a certain type of music. So I think with that ethos kind of agreed upon between her and her fans, the personal validation element aligns with what her fans want as well. For example, if she just did a bunch of sappy love songs, or the top trending kind of YouTube hits, that would work. It'd be fine, and she could do that pretty easily. But I don't think her core fans would clamour for that kind of material. So there's a need for authenticity as well. There’s something else as well that’s quite unique to her: if you look at all the branding around her work, with Club Sandwich and Ronaq as well, and the way that she does merch drops, I think that's a lot of what her fans want, in terms of building a story around the work and enjoying that. I don't think artists usually enjoy that kind of joke, which is really hard to push forward as well, but she really gets into it. And I think that that type of delivery of joy is driven by who's listening to her music.”

It’s no surprise that Natasha’s brushoffs in Faltu Pyaar and Lover Boy Romance and the earnest, let’s-lay-it-all-out- the-table vibe in Laiyan Laiyan are easy to connect with. If what Natasha’s listeners have identified with is that innate understanding of what it’s like to be a woman in some contexts in Pakistan — of what it is like to burn and be burned, to want to dance, scream, shout, be on the phone, then perhaps the most obvious thing to do would be to do is to double down on it. Instead, Natasha has pivoted already, the pastel outfits from her hit Choro are done and dusted — and she is onto the next thing, putting out an EP because she had these songs — with different vibes — that she wanted to get out.

It is precisely what Natasha is doing — making music because of the vibes, dropping an EP because the songs felt good and ready, or even just being a mainstream female musician, let alone a genre-jumping one — that’s a difficult proposition in Pakistan. It’s perhaps why Natasha wants to be in control — why she has to be at the printer herself, or why she needs to check on every detail. The fear is what if this whole production — the Natasha Noorani experience — doesn’t sound nuanced.

“I feel like there is only a one-note understanding of what an artist can be, especially a female artist,” Natasha says. “I can't explain to you how many times people have told me to stick to a lane. And I'm just like, I haven't been able to do that in my non-music professional career. […]  So if I have the ability and I am good at it — then why not? Everything I do sounds like me. It doesn't sound derivative, or so I'd like to believe it. I feel like especially with women, industry insiders are like, ‘Alright. Do you wanna be a playback singer for OSTs, or do you want to go into pretty, soft girl territory, or do you want to be qawwali core?’ And I would pick none of the above -  or all of the above, for that matter. I think that's taken people a lot of time to catch up to. The really amazing thing is then to see people around me, whether it's producers, artists, musicians being like, ‘Wow, Okay. People are connecting with you.’ And I'm like, yes. Like, this is what I have been saying for six months.”

She won’t mention who would say the choose-a-lane line specifically, other than “well-wishers” and “higher up people in the decision-making spaces,” but that the majority of people were well-intentioned, and wanted her to be realistic about having a career in music.

The reality is that there is no industry churning out pop stars — or even qawwali girls or whatnot. There are producers and sponsors, and the producers making music for sponsors. The straggling men of the 2000s era — those that have survived — have either been revealed for predatory behaviour and harassment, or are now working as producers. Women are simply not getting as much of a say at the table, and they aren’t streamed as much as the men, Natasha says.

Natasha has done Velo Sound Station but not Coke Studio; she’s done a song for PSL, but not a solo. Pasoori’s fame has been centred around Ali Sethi, not Shae Gill. There’s no shortage of male musicians: on tour, making diss tracks, making music about launda culture, what it feels like to be out at 3 am, singing explicitly about making out, but most importantly, getting solo opportunities. There are rooms that women are shut out of, and when they are brought in, they’re pitted against each other. Or when they’re brought together, like two women on a song, as Natasha points out, it becomes a feminist track.

“I think we just have to work twice as hard and yet be twice as underrepresented, and that's what it is. And I have no genuine answer as to why, because it's not just me. I see - globally, but also especially in Pakistan - the girlies are not getting their due. For example, a lot of main songs that are released in a year are duets. Because you're not trusting a woman to handle a song by herself. You're not giving her the hit. You can do an all-boys lineup in a song and not call it an all-boys lineup, but when it's two girls, you're just like, ‘wow, feminism.’”

The odd part of this is that Pakistan has a fantastic history of female musicians who didn't stick to one lane; this country’s musical history is held up by women. Part of knowing that Natasha didn't have to stick to one lane was her archival research. “I didn't realise how much of it would seep into me, just in terms of listenership or just in terms of looking at newer role models, you know what I mean? Like, I think that's what really gave me hope is that I saw people like Nahid Akhtar and I was like, whoa, okay, we can do, you know, a film dance track and also sing ghazals, like amazing. That was the validation I needed, because all I was told my whole career was to pick a lane, was to not do so many things, pick one dabba, but I was like, I can do all of it.” With the release of Club Sandwich, and with Ronaq behind her, it seems like there’s less pressure to perform, that she is okay with saying no and losing out on opportunities because there are things she does not want to do.

Natasha, of course, is often compared to the late Nazia Hassan; and the comparison isn’t entirely unwarranted. There’s the obvious: the long hair, the outfits, the pop girlie magic, the upper class background, and the undeniable connection between aag de de, aag le le (Nazia, 1984) to aag main khadi hui aag main yun bheeg chuki hoon dekho zara (Natasha, 2021). But probably not since Nazia, or perhaps Hadiqa, have we had someone who can so swiftly cross genres in the mainstream, urban music scene. Nazia, like Natasha, could sing an Aap Jaisa Koi and the wholesome Dosti or reference the operator culture in Telephone Pyar, just like Natasha can sing a Choro — a melancholy song that features a disco clap — and a weddingy Chamkeela, or sing on Umair’s Intentions.

“Intentions is a song that I personally really enjoyed making, and I don’t know why, but from the very first day, it felt very personal to me,” Umair said via email, when I asked about having Natasha feature on his album. “I needed an angelic voice for it, and who could do that better than Natasha? That’s when I decided to put her on the track alongside one of my favorite rappers JJ47 to it.”

The musician Abdullah Siddiqui, an increasingly high-profile producer who has worked on projects like the PSL anthem, has often collaborated with her. Abdullah reflected on how they’ve changed since they met and started working together. “The great thing about working with her as a musician is that she's kind of up for anything. She is really interested in exploring all sorts of styles, all sorts of genres, which is the same for me. And I think that's why we got along so well,” Abdullah said. “And I feel like, just between the two of us, we've worked on so many things together that are in so many different styles. That kind of openness is what we've both kind of acquired over the years. I think in the beginning she definitely had a particular style, and she's just become so much more versatile and so much more open and more open to taking creative risks and just more artistically free over the years.”

But where does that come from, I asked Abdullah. “When I first met her, when I first  started working with her, she was an industry person first and foremost, she was somebody who was known for connecting people and for being somebody with a lot of know-how as far as the business goes. She always had a great sense of A&R. She was good at curating a lineup for a festival. She was good at marketing something. She was good at procuring funding. She was good at those things. But I think, because that was the priority, I think that she wasn't able to turn her attention towards her own music as much as she would have wanted to at that time.  And even though under all of it, she really just wanted to be a musician full time. Over time, since I've known her, she's become more herself. It's also just a matter of bravery — it takes a certain amount of courage to just jump into music headfirst, because you do kind of have to give it your everything to become good, you know? And I think that obviously it takes a little bit of time for somebody to get to that place where they can commit themselves fully to their art. That’s the process that I've seen with her over the last several years.”

And Natasha Noorani is fully committed. In fact, being in her company almost makes you want to run out and write, produce, create, because here is someone so fully committed that she has ideas — that watching other people sample music, achieve things, makes her believe that it’s possible, allowed, even, to push herself more. Perhaps that’s what it is — Natasha has hope and almost fiery ambition, that fire that allows someone to be burned and burn and create art about both.

So have you been asked to do Coke Studio recently, I asked Natasha.

“No,” she said.

Why does she think that is?

“That’s something you'd have to ask the producers. I don't take it super personally because I've been a part of the curation system before. And I think it is often a numbers game while also an ease of understanding game. So, yeah, I feel like maybe I don't check their boxes for now, and I feel like that's not been an essential goal for me. I've had ins, but I feel like it's up to them.”

So if it's not a goal for Natasha, what is?

“World domination. I feel for me, the goal is to actually just be in global charts, because we live in a world where we can't be held back by geography. There is a larger world that I would like to connect with. The experiences I’ve had this year and the people that I've managed to connect with through whatever little music I've made has been more global than it has been domestic. So that's where I'm dreaming. I feel like this is just the beginning, and I'm gearing up for that. I see larger things. I like performing live a lot, so I feel like I wanna do a massive festival tour,  in the States or North America or Europe. Performing at different spaces is definitely a big checklist for me. Collaborating with different musicians and producers in life, I think those are the things that I that I value because I learned so much with every song and, like, there's, like, I'm really deeply deeply — maybe too deeply — connected to music in that way where I'm just happy to nerd out for hours, and I'm seeking those connections to fulfil the creative juices in me, perpetually, whether it's visual, audio, whatever it is. And I think that's the goal. I think the goal is that actually, for the first time in my whole life, I wake up and I'm like, dude, am I living my dream? Am I just casually hanging out with people I, you know, dreamt of and just writing music with them, for them, by them?”

Maybe this is the dream. Maybe we’re all in Natasha Noorani’s burning ambition of a world, the world in which she is ready to tap into whatever exists, into her talent and into the archives, in her brain, in pop culture moments past, present, and future, to engineer her way into our lives and playlists, onto end-of-year lists and into the ether, all to an eventual reality when, like Ahsan Khan, we’ll all be vaguely nodding along and saying, I really like Natasha Noorani.