The only Indian track on NASA’s Voyager Golden Record, curated by Carl Sagan in 1977 and currently drifting billions of kilometers away from Earth, is Kesarbai Kerkar’s “Jaat Kahan Ho.” There are moments in the song when the Hindustani classical vocalist is almost crying—the aching is too perceptible, too universal. While the genre spans from heroic to erotic to devotional, it is also anchored in yearning, born of separation, or viraha, which takes many forms. In “Jaat Kahan Ho,” it arrives through the voice of someone watching a young woman leaving. Consider, too, “Babul Mora Naihar Chhooto Jaaye,” the popular thumri written by Wajid Ali Shah and immortalized by Begum Akhtar, among others. Deposed as the ruler of Awadh and exiled by the British in 1856, Shah cast his own banishment in the voice of a bride leaving her father’s house for her husband’s.
Throughout Room Jhoom, Ali Sethi finds endless variations on this yearning. In the standout track “Binati,” he sings about trying in vain to reach someone. Could it be the New York-based musician’s hope to return to Pakistan, where he was born and trained by vocalists such as Farida Khanum and Ustad Naseeruddin Saami? This same country is now increasingly hostile to him, with right-wing groups and trolls sending a torrent of abuse and threats after he came out in 2024. Sethi may also be expressing the yearning to reach his many listeners across the border in India, his widest audience, where his Instagram account, along with those of most Pakistani artists, still remains blocked after the brief India-Pakistan conflict last year.
Sethi already explored themes of censorship and exile throughout his 2025 debut, Love Language. On Room Jhoom, made in collaboration with the American drummer and composer Gregory Rogove, a sense of ease radiates from every track. In “Jogi Mera,” Rogove generates a hypnotic pulse with his muted drum arrangement that hovers like distant temple bells while Sethi’s trance-like repetition of the phrase “Jogi Mera,” Jogi being a Sufi wanderer, inhabits an atmosphere that is part Sufi Sama and part desert folk. “Flying” is Sethi’s ode to Lord Krishna and Holi, wrapped in a lattice of Gyan Riley’s subtle acoustic guitar and Rogove’s barely-there percussion. But the nucleus is Sethi’s mastery of the meend: a prominent feature of Hindustani classical music where the singer glides between two notes without any perceptible vocal break.
Sethi sings in the birahini mode of aching, which dissolves the boundaries of gender and faith. The birahini form comes through clearly in “Angana,” where he sings as a bejeweled woman waiting for her beloved in the angana, or the courtyard of her home that is traditionally a woman’s threshold: “Aaye woh aaye woh mere angana/Laaye woh laaye woh mere rangana/Khanke paayal mori, bolay kangana/Ruk jaayein raat, hai meri mangana” (“May he come, may he come to my courtyard/May he come and bring it into bloom/My anklets chime, my bangles speak/Let the night hold still, that is all I ask”). The beloved never arrives, at least not on this track. The longing holds, stretching into the long hours of the night.
In “Angana” and across the album, the lyrics are largely in the North Indian dialects of Khari Boli and Braj Bhasha, the poetic languages used by lovers and poets for centuries. And yet, Room Jhoom defies the purist tenets of Hindustani classical music. The title track begins with Sethi’s interpretation of the slow, unmetered alaap, where he unfolds each raga, note by note, like a prayer bead. But instead of the usual instrumental silence, or in some cases a harmonium drone that accompanies alaap, Rogove’s synth haze fills the space. Instead of the tanpura, the four-stringed instrument which underlines every note, Saunder Jurriaans’ clarinet swells gradually. In “I Wait,” Jordan Katz’s trumpet, and not the sarangi that traditionally trails a Hindustani classical singer’s every slide, follows and amplifies Sethi’s meend. The accompaniment functions like a shadow, tracing the path a bowed string once would have.
The only bright counterpart to all the separation and aching is “Embrace.” It leans towards the milan, or the union of love: “My beloved has now come to my door,” Sethi sings in Hindustani. “Now I will not let you go.” The track is set in Raag Bhopali—a pentatonic raga traditionally sung in the first hours of the night. “Embrace” represents a maturity in Sethi’s approach to adapting Hindustani classical music: no reggaeton-inflected raga-pop, hand claps, or even a hint of the Turkish bağlama-like sound of “Pasoori,” his 2022 viral track that Room Jhoom was initially planned to follow up. His concerns are waiting, loving, and yearning—themes that don’t always require an orchestra or a manifesto. With just eight lean tracks, Room Jhoom relishes the quiet moments. It’s an album to sit and meditate with, Sethi’s version of the music he learned during the summers back in Lahore at the feet of his ustads, away from the noise.
