Shruthy Parthasarathy was just messing around on the piano, running through a simple pop progression, when something in it stuck. "I really liked how it sounded so I tried to come up with a melody on it," she says. Small chord changes crept in. Then a groove, low and funky, under the whole thing. And in that stretch, without deciding to, she noticed the melody pulling toward something older and more familiar. Carnatic music, the kind she grew up around, had quietly written itself into a pop song.
That song, co-written with Bhavani Ananthasubramanian, is Theera Kadal and it opens Nyima Vol.2, the second compilation from Nyima Records. Shruthy’s song opens the record, and the first thing listeners hear is Tamil, not English. That wasn’t incidental. For co-founders Sanoli Chowdhary and Vinod Gadher, widening the compilation beyond English felt less like a decision and more like an obvious next step, given how much talent they’d been sitting with. Shruthy feels that shift from the inside too. She’s spent years performing English funk and jazz on Chennai stages, but something in her, she says, kept reaching for a language she could actually think in. "I have always wanted to get songwriters and artistes to make music in a language I would express myself the best in," she says, "and also wanted to find audience to cater to that."
The title alone does a lot of work. Theera Kadal loosely translates to an endless sea, it was written, she explains, about the flood of emotion tied to a first love, something that doesn’t resolve so much as keep moving, wave after wave. Musically, the song mirrors that restlessness. There’s a rhythmic idea buried in the track that most pop listeners will never consciously register but will absolutely feel. "In technical terms I think music movements in groups of five is pretty rare," she says. "I wanted to use that and make the best of it." It’s the kind of detail you’d miss on a first listen and then can’t unhear once someone points it out.
Chennai runs through all of it, even the parts Parasarathy can’t fully trace back. Margazhi season, the city’s famous winter run of Carnatic concerts, was where she first encountered live music up close, unfiltered, before she had language for any of it. "These dance and music concerts were how I was first exposed to raw live music," she says. "I’m sure all these elements has greatly improved my musicality." It shows up less as direct quotation and more as instinct, the way a city seeps into how someone hears rhythm without them ever sitting down to study it.
Parasarathy produced Theera Kadal herself, working largely on a Korg synth, pulling in textures she’d never been able to use live. Those choices, she says, are what give the track its dreamlike pull. Getting there wasn’t smooth. One transition in particular, the bridge from chorus into second stanza, refused to cooperate for a long stretch. "It was either too empty or sounded like a patch work," she admits. It took a mentor, a friend named Harish Kumar who eventually mixed the track, to help sculpt the section into something that finally moved the way she’d heard it in her head. She’s quick to credit him for it, calling his programming work on the song extremely important.
What she wants from a first listen is almost disarmingly simple. "I really hope they are able to listen to something fresh and new but interesting as well," she says.
Nyima Vol.2 drops October 2. Start with track one.
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