I first saw Karshni Nair perform at Skinny Mo’s Jazz Club in December 2025 — an intimate, confessional set of autobiographical songs — as part of ‘Counter Encounter’, the 15th-anniversary celebration of Kolkata-based arts and culture collective Artsforward. Her debut album, ‘Buck Wild’, could not have been further from that set, both in terms of themes and sonic identity.

Released in January 2026, ‘Buck Wild’ marks a striking departure from the Pune-based singer-songwriter-producer’s acoustic folk beginnings. While her earlier work moved with the unhurried pace of the genre, ‘Buck Wild’ arrives feral and fully formed, combining her confessional lyrics with electronic soundscapes in a way that feels like a rupture in Karshni’s journey. The result is one of the more formally ambitious self-produced debuts to emerge from India’s independent music circuit in recent years.

Across eight chronological vignettes, Karshni captures a dizzying portrait of a descent into madness: the discovery of a gaping hole (also the title of the first track), the desperate need for another creature to fill it, and the eventual brutalisation and harm that follows. “I do it for the plot, my guy / I’m a raging fiend for this device, / And when the scene is on its knees, / I’ll do all that I can to steal” Karshni sings in ‘Glimmerance’, the second song of the album.

The chronological arc Karshni constructs here is almost deceptively simple: it follows a linear, straightforward trajectory from the discovery of lust to its pursuit and consequences. The conceit is clever without being coy. Karshni has borrowed the buck — a male deer in heat, mythologised for his unguarded appetite for another body — as a vessel for this hunger, a metaphor, then deliberately feminised it in its anxiety. The metaphor works because Karshni never overreaches its potential. She doesn’t romanticise the buck’s lust, nor does she sentimentalise the eventual harm that comes his way. He simply learns, the hard way, what most women learn before they’ve had the chance to want anything at all.

‘Buck Wild’ indicts the social rituals and rites of passage that pre-load female desire with guilt and wariness — a conditioning so early and so total that it precedes the experience of desire itself, any desire at all. In charting a transformation from yearning to its aftermath, Karshni is not simply documenting heartbreak or a bad relationship. She is mapping a more insidious process: the internalisation of punishment, the body that grows afraid of its own appetite, and the correctional procedures it imposes on itself to return to “normal.” But normal, in this context, means normative, manageable, and unscandalous. To be normal means to want nothing at all.

As Executive and Record Producer, Karshni has collaborated with Circle Tone on ‘Glimmerence’, Brij Dalvi on ‘Dinner’ and ‘72 Hours’, and Disco Puppet on ‘Malapropism’, without surrendering the record’s central vision. While Sanjay Das has mixed the album, Karshni admits she “has not been shy to edit, change or redo the collaborative material in the past few months, exploring various synthesisers, vocal processing tools, sampling and textural elements.” The result is a soundtrack buzzing with electronic elements that add an urgency — a contemporary, almost nervous energy that would have been impossible to conjure within her folk framework alone. These arrangements feel like a body under pressure: restless, probing, and occasionally strange.

Karshni’s writing has always functioned, in her own words, as “both scalpel and salve.” On ‘Buck Wild’, the scalpel goes deeper. The album is darkly humorous where it needs to be, disarmingly direct where that lands harder, and genuinely unsettling in the way only work made from lived experience tends to be.

Karshni can be found on Instagram at @karshninair. Buy the album here.

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