When do we call something mythic? Perhaps when it no longer belongs only to its time but speaks to all times. Myths are generally associated to stories of gods and wars; they are also mirrors that reflect our most human concerns — love, jealousy, ambition, loyalty, betrayal, the hunger to know our place in the world. The religious texts of our world have become so referential not just because of their divinity alone, but because they stage the eternal questions we carry as thinking beings: what it means to act with integrity; what it costs to desire; what it is to live among others. The mythic is that which becomes larger than life precisely because it exposes what is most elemental about life itself.
Which is what makes Shikriwal’s 'Natya Alaapika' achieves as well: an aural theatre in which inner conflicts, human relationships and moral choices are staged through sound. Personal yet allegorical, the record treats ordinary dilemmas as grand explorations with folk sounds, old-school boom-bap, jazz fusions, Indian melodies, and Bhojpuri inflections, positioning them as the very substance of humanity.
Across the record, there are moments of deliberate contrast: songs that embrace communal uplift and small ecstatic relief; others that satirise authority with a knowing, playful bite. The album is both tough when it must be and vulnerable when the themes call for it. It treats moral and intellectual inquiries with an endearing sincerety. And this dexterity can be credited to Shikariwal's approach to songwriting.
"Growing up, I was always searching for my purpose, my identity in this world, and the contribution I could make. I found my way through writing, and later I learned music as a way to express those writings more fully. The influences weren’t just artists but also the realities I lived in, the people I observed, and the truths that surrounded me."Shikriwal
The album brilliantly dips into relationships — lovers, parents, friends and foes, imagined children while folding those private scenes into wider reckonings about identity, ambition, integrity, and values. Tracks like 'Matrabhav' read as a tender act of will: over a lullaby-like instrumental Shikriwal speaks a girl who inherits the attributes of her ancestors, and names the small, stubborn hopes that anchor a life. Elsewhere 'Mahabharat' turns the domestic into epic, treating everyday betrayals and alliances of a romance as continuations of an old, combustible story. 'Kaaya' makes the body a site of ritualized change, mapping desire and transformation onto flesh and habit, and 'Kanoon' reads like an inquiry into law and hypocrisy, testing the distance between codified rules and how people actually live.
'Niryanak' incisively questions the weight of decision-making. On the contrary, 'Anandmay' functions as a pore of joy — a counterbalance to the record’s seriousness — while 'Vyapar' treats trade and market-life as a moral tableau, asking what survival costs when dignity is the currency. A departure in tone from the rest of the record, 'Tanashahi' supplies comic relief: a pointedly playful satire of small authority and performative power that lets Shikriwal land his critique with irony and a healthy measure of fun. The album’s small, domestic motifs expand into larger questions about belonging and value, functioning essentially as ethical diagrams of how character and circumstance collide.
But even with the stellar writing, the sound is the record’s most striking feat. Old-school hip-hop textures and boom-bap drums coexist with folk percussion, modal strings, breathy winds, hints of bhakti , and an ingenuity in production that favours space and human detail over glossy homogeny. These sonic shifts are dramaturgical and expansive, both grounding a scene in tradition or pushing it towards abstraction. As Shikriwal himself puts it, "...it’s my way of staging inner conflicts, societal observations, and spiritual dialogues through sound. The album's title 'Natya Alaapika' reflects this duality: Natya as performance, drama, storytelling, and Alaapika as the melodic unfolding of emotions. Together, they suggest a stage where my voice plays different roles, where every track is a character, a mood, or a fragment of my journey."
Natya Alaapika is singular in the way it separates itself from the many contemporaneous attempts at 'regional rap' that so often trade in nuance for novelty. It also foregrounds a subaltern voice that refuses the music-industry’s habitual obeisance to Western-taste signalling. Shikriwal’s argument is simple and sharp: authenticity is not a costume. He rejects the idea that being 'cool' requires erasing regional speech or flattening folk textures; instead, he places his roots in full view and treats them with equal awe and craft.
In doing so the album performs a small but crucial dismantling of post-colonial shame and the internalised self-hatred that sometimes attaches itself to 'desi' forms. It treats what is local as source material tinged with pride. In this radical acceptance and reclamation of its own voice, the album lays down of a civic vocabulary: a blueprint for how rooted music can be unmistakably modern without mimicking metropolitan fashions.
What the album ultimately becomes is a manifesto — a disciplined way of listening and a modest politics of form. By privileging attentiveness, intention, and a freshness in both thought and sound, the record trains its audience to linger on the inner contradictions and the kinds of everyday trials and tribulations that usually go unremarked, rendering its moral and cultural complexity audible in the process. Natya Alaapika models itself within musical self-sovereignty, and in nudging listeners to carry these scenes into their own imaginations, it asks us to do the same.
Follow Shikriwal here and listen to the album below:
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