"Albums are like diaries. You go through phases, technically and emotionally, and they reflect the state that you're in at the time.”

— Kate Bush.

When you listen to an album all the way through, you hear the shape of someone’s ideas. It’s a slower and deeper way of engaging with both the music and the artist behind it. We have been bringing you our monthly playlist for the last few years. But in an age of shorter attention spans and disrupted dopamine cycles, it felt important to return to a more intentional way of turning in. In this feature, we bring you our favourite albums from Homegrown artists this year as a way to not just be better fans of music, but also better human beings with the courtesy to listen to someone's artistic expression; something they've poured a lot of soul and countless hours into.

Tienas’ 'O Deluxe' is an emotional map of millennial and Gen Z disaffection — songs of loneliness, drug-soaked detachment and heartbreak folded into moments of blunt, sarcastic defiance. Sonically it’s a step up from his lo-fi debut. This album is a maximalist, textural record built from warped vocoders, samples, lo-fi beats and pitched voices where R&B and electronic elements meet grime. Moving between volatile, bursts and sultry, late-night confessionals, the album is a cinematic and immersive portrait of our generation.

'Skin' is an outstanding debut release for Onno collective by Goa-based composer, producer, and visual artist Skulk (the moniker of Katyayini Gargi). It is a twelve-track, synth-driven album that places her unique voice and songwriting reminiscent of Fiona Apple at the centre. It's bold, slightly off-kilter, and carried by inventive sound design. Structured into two distinct halves, it moves between the inward work of staying afloat in everyday life and the outward push of navigating the socio-political world.

Shikriwal's debut album emerges as a a musical theatre of inner conflict with personal relationships, moral dilemmas, belonging and ambition all finding space within its tracks. The sound weaves folk percussion, Indian melodies, old-school boom-bap drums, jazz inflections and Bhojpuri vocal textures, creating a sonic world that's rooted in his region of origin but manages to reach far beyond it. Celebrating community, exposing hypocrisy, and charting inner struggle, the album reject the music industry’s pressure to mimic Western-style 'cool', privileging sincerity through local speech and folk traditions.

shauharty’s mixtape works is a four-act reckoning of Ego, Pleasure, Identity, Acceptance in a journey through self-confrontation and growth. Its sound taps into old-school New York–style jazz-inflected hip-hop and warm R&B: soft piano, brass, vinyl textures, with sparse bass and layered, creative samples. Lyrically, the artist moves between brash self-deconstruction, dismantling ego, questioning ambition, and an exploration of his own self. Rejecting the macho posturing common in rap, the album chooses sensitivity and self-awareness instead.

Pinkshift’s new album feels like a collision of rage, vulnerability and mythology, shaped by the Vedas as much as by the band’s own inner turbulence. The album leans into their punk-pop and metalcore roots — chugging riffs, breakdowns, soaring hooks — but ties them to questions about creation, destruction, and the weight of being alive right now. Across the project, you hear the push and pull between anger and healing, especially in how the band treats the self as something both fragile and powerful. It’s a record that tries to understand chaos, grounding its heaviest moments in what is some very poignant spiritual inquiry.

Angad Berar’s latest album comes across as a soft, late-night reimagining of psychedelia — rooted in 60s–70s rock, krautrock and Hindustani classical traditions, but filtered through a calm, reflective modern lens. From mellow acoustic meditations, bells and gentle ambience to tracks with worldbeat rhythms, vinyl-like textures, distant fuzz and ambient soundscapes — the album shifts between dreamy introspection and subtle grooves built for long drives, long, thoughtful evenings or drifting through mood-scapes.

Parvaaz’s 'Na Gul Na Gulistan' sits in that space between disillusionment and a tentative kind of hope, tracing what it means to question belief, confront mortality, and live with the ache of things that can’t be repaired. It's an expansive folk-rock record that pairs chiming acoustic guitars and patient drums with ambient washes and cinematic swells. Here, spare moments sit next to fuller, progressive rock gestures. The band keeps the project song-forward: with careful arrangements, drifting textures, and Khalid Ahamed’s inward lyrics that give the album a reflective, elegiac mood. Overall, it’s Parvaaz at their most vulnerable and deliberately devastating

In her new album, Ditty draws from her migrant past and mixed influences from India and Europe to build a record that’s bilingual, and rooted in her expansive identity. The production is stripped-down, with gentle piano, handclaps, tambourines and environmental sounds like birdsong or rustling leaves — sometimes even recorded outdoors to let nature be part of the song. Through themes of colourism, migration, loss, climate, gender and hope, KĀLĪ is both an honest, poetic reclaimation of the self and a rather critical dialogue with the world.

Adi & Dishaan's album is a ten-track soundtrack for a night out — from the pregame to the club to the drive home. Built on groovy basslines, crisp drums, and lush guitars their production is a nod to Pharrell, Timbaland, and Justin Timberlake as much as to relatively newer producers like Kaytranada. It's a sweet spot between Adi's razor-sharp delivery and Dishaan's sticky, honeyed hooks. Be it the club-ready but warm 'Midnight' or 'IDK' that slows things down into a smoky, sensual space, the record feels like a softcore rave.

som.’s iconic new mixtape sketches a mosaic of moods and themes mirroring the attention span, anxieties and small bursts of euphoria most familiar to Gen-Z listeners. The artist moves between English and Hindi, blending R&B, hyperpop, drum & bass, dance-leaning electronics and 2000s-Bollywood pastiche into something that's loose, idiosyncratic, and unmistakably his. The mixtape shifts from yearning to mischief, from reassurance to self-mockery, often leaning into auto-tune and glitch. It's a sound built out of streaming-age raw material that reflects lived-in insecurities, social satire, and fleeting love all at once.

Varun Nimbolkar’s EP builds a small emotional world out of Indian classical music, electronica, hip-hop, ghazal and blues, using the sitar and his production choices as the main storytelling tools. Each track feels like its own vignette — some leaning into trancey, operatic intensity, others into softer, ghazal-tinged melancholy — but all connected by a sense of longing that runs through the record. With a cinematic narrative, the EP is composed, intentional, and expansive.

The three-track record by Pune-based alternative-hardcore-shoegaze quintet CVRSES distills the frenetic energy of their live set into songs that feel crushing and tender both at once, creating a portrait of longing and rage. The EP brings together the emo and post-hardcore angst of the early 2000s with the more self-aware melancholy of modern indie pop. With influences ranging from Enter Shikari and Turnstile to Deftones and Holding Absence, CVRSES approaches 'Heart Decay' with an unflinching look at what remains after love, faith, and certainty have burned away.

In her new album, Sijya digs into her heavy distorted synths, rhythms, and textures, which are pushed until they feel both fragile and beautifully abrasive. Built from digital synthesis and analogue grit, the EP leans into distortion as an emotional language. There’s a sense of tension running through the record, a kind of emotional warping that sits underneath the ambiguity of her lyrics. Guided by Matthew Herbert and Hugh Jones, Sijya pushes her palette further here, letting spontaneous moments, like a guitar line reshaping an electronic track, break open new directions in her sound.

'Mental Sunshine' is an album shaped by small sonic experiments and the slow work of making sense of your own mind. It blends obscure folk influences with atmospheric electronica, textural club-leaning beats and ambient soundscapes that move between drifting synth lines, ethereal vocal chops, breakbeats, ambient textures and the occasional euphoric lift. Across the record, themes of emotional honesty, overthinking, softness and the search for small pockets of brightness keep circling back into the frame.

Midnight Agenda’s 'Nafrat' is a four-track manifesto of rage and resistance that ignites India’s goth and hardcore punk underground. The EP hits with thunderous bass, scorching guitars and crashing drums, leaning into hardcore punk’s breakneck intensity while weaving in eerie gothic post-punk touches. Written entirely in Hindi, Nafrat channels socio-political frustration and satirical critique straight into its hooks, taking aim at complacency, media deceit, and social hypocrisy.

NATE08 stretches his blend of R&B, deep house and funk into something warmer and more open, built on sun-drenched production, late-night basslines and soulful grooves in his latest album. The project moves through dreamy house, syrupy R&B hybrids and slow-burn dance tracks, with collaborators like Mary Ann Alexander, Dishaan, Mallika, Dappest, Sahirah and Benni Ola shaping its vocal world, with a clear love for the emotional core of house music.

Deveshi Sahgal’s debut album released by Tiger Baby Records, brings her emotionally rich take on Sufi music into focus. The five-track album blends timeless Sufi poetry with a contemporary musical expression, shaped by themes of self-discovery, divine love and transcendence. While Mohammed Muneem Nazir’s original composition anchors the title track, the other songs reinterpret works by poets like Amir Khusrau, Bulleh Shah and Dagh Dehlvi, carried by Deveshi’s warm, devotional style. The record is rooted in classical Sufi tradition but guided by her instinct to make these messages resonate emotionally with listeners today.

Rivu’s 'Dinosaurs' is a five-track, genre-defying concept EP built around the turbulence of grief, tracing the five stages from denial and anger to bargaining, depression, and acceptance through sound. Using elements of progressive rock as its backbone, the EP deliberately shifts between lo-fi jazz, ambient electronica, industrial metal, alt-pop and dance-leaning textures to mirror the emotional shifts that loss brings.

Rashmeet Kaur’s new EP reworks the songs from her debut into spare, live versions that put wandering, identity and becoming at the centre. Musically the sessions meld Punjabi folk and classical vocal control with soft ambient washes, harmonium-like drones, gentle percussion and small digital textures. The arrangements let the voice lead and the soundscape follow. Overall the live project reads as a slow, inward journey. It's intimate, humble and clearly shaped by years of experimentation.

sudan’s latest release is a compact four-track EP that lives in those small, delicate, and careful moments. The record pairs warm, low-fi electronics with intimate guitar lines and close, confessional vocals. His production choices here are spare, with small clicks, soft synth pads and gentle beats. Across its short run he works with a tight crew — Bengaluru’s Frizzell D’Souza, Sikkim’s Anoushka Maskey, and Mumbai’s Tejas on vocals and songwriting, with saxophonist Gautam David and pianist Nathan Thampy also contributing. With a lot of brilliant detail on the textures, the record is a lived-in collection that feels like someone polishing the edges of a sound they’ve been shaping for a while.

If you enjoyed reading this here's more from Homegrown:

'Lapgan Is Ecstatic' Connects A Mos Def Classic To South Asian Musical Histories

‘ONE STROKE’: RANJ & Tienas Join Forces On A Breathless New Bass-Heavy Banger

How The Qawwali Became Indian Cinema’s Most Enduring Ode To A Secular Nation