After putting herself on the map in July with debut single "Psycho Hole", 21-year-old Indian-born Australian Ashwarya is now ready with her follow-up "Biryani". Building on the predecessor's mix of chart-invading pop and club-ready R&B, "Biryani" cranks those two elements up even further and, with a verse sung in Hindi, stirs in some extra nods to her Indian heritage.
Explaining how the song came together, Ashwarya told Complex: "I was legit eating Biryani and thought to myself how damn good it is. How when all the right ingredients come together, it's like no other. I knew I had to write a song about it. I wrote it with my producer, Jarrad Rogers, and the first thing that felt really natural was the Hindi/English verse and from there everything pretty much fell into place. On the surface, yes, it's a love song; there's passion and it's fun and a bit tongue-in-cheek, but whilst writing it, there was always an element of sadness and obsession, like I'm literally comparing someone to food."
Thanks to ongoing lockdown restrictions in Melbourne, Ashwarya was forced to go it alone with this one, creating much of the visuals herself with only Zoom calls to connect her to her creative director Emile Frederick. "We were and are still in a pretty major lockdown in Melbourne so I ended up shooting it in my garage, inside of a 55-gallon barrel where I performed to a 360 GoPro, no crews," she says. "My dad helped me pump the paint until it eventually drowned me. It was as DIY as it gets in terms of set up. Looking back on it though, it was such a sick experience, but I'm not going to lie: I was slightly traumatised by it."
Peep the "Biryani" visuals above and be sure to add the song to your playlists.
