The article focuses on RANJ’s debut mixtape '27 CLUB', a bilingual project released around her turning 27 that reflects on identity, intimacy, ambition, desire and self-definition. Thematically, it moves through womanhood, bodily autonomy, faith, and emotional confrontation, positioning the tape as a personal reckoning, across an electronic-heavy production, trap drums, thick bass lines, R&B textures, downtempo moments and flashes of old-school hip-hop, creating an eclectic soundscape that shifts between rap and melodic vocals.
Ranjani Ramadoss is a Chennai-bred musician currently based in Mumbai, who started her solo project RANJ in 2021. Trained in classical singing, RANJ has been part of a duo with producer Clifr and has helped stitch Indian English/Tamil indie into something that isn’t simply derivative of Western pop but grounded, personal, and fresh. Her voice — growing up around Carnatic, church music, and then Beyoncé and hip-hop — flips between rap and singing, embodying a duality where she aims to honour and showcase her cultural roots while creating music that resonates with a global audience.
Each release since then has occupied a different musical and lyrical space, as if she’s been testing how far she can stretch her voice without losing where she comes from. Her debut mixtape, '27 CLUB', feels like a devoted practice to that commitment. The project is titled after her turning 27 and navigates the fault lines between inheritance and self-definition, examining what it means to exist between languages, expectations, and emotional realities. Executive produced by her longtime collaborator Clifr, who appears on nine songs, and shaped alongside more than thirteen producers, the bilingual tape moves through electronic-heavy production, trap drums, thick bass lines, downtempo stretches, flashes of old-school hip-hop, and vibrant melodies of R&B.
Thematically, the writing moves through desire, affection, romance and courtship, but also gets into longing and selfhood in ways that feel tied to womanhood and power, especially when she addresses shunning the haters and claiming space for herself. RANJ references to different aspects of womanhood with conversations around everything from birth control to ambition. The artist positions the heart of the mixtape within the dichotomies of ‘intimacy and distance, devotion and disillusionment, performance and truth’. Throughout, RANJ confronts subjects often left unspoken - family fracture, bodily autonomy, faith, and loss as acts of reclamation more than just confessions.
The mixtape is a compendium of reflections in her 27 years of life that she authors with the narrative sensibilities of a songwriter, with an exciting and incredibly eclectic soundscape that we have come to know her for. “This was a process of removing distance between what I felt and what I allowed myself to say. Turning 27 clarified things I had spent years avoiding - parts of my identity, my anger, my grief, my ambition,” she notes. “ These songs came from confronting those realities without softening them. 27 CLUB represents a shift for me - from waiting, to deciding; from observing, to moving.”
Follow RANJ here and listen to the mixtape below:
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