![Sijya on her new EP, 'Leather & Brass [Retrofitted]'.](http://media.assettype.com/homegrown%2F2026-10-06%2Fa2kjen71%2Fsijya1.png?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
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Sijya revisits her sophomore EP Leather & Brass with seven producers, including Rachika Nayar, Jlin and Sneha Khanwalkar, who reinterpret its tracks through their own approaches to electronic music. Retrofitted offers a closer look at Sijya’s ideas around collaboration, authorship and letting other artists take her music in new directions.
Sijya has spent the last few years moving between visual work and music, first emerging through boxout.fm and her 2022 debut EP Young Hate before releasing Leather & Brass through One Little Independent Records in September 2025. After studying graphic design at NID, she worked on album artwork, event graphics and projects around Delhi’s electronic music community, eventually finding her way into an Ableton workshop that nudged her towards making music herself. The instincts carried over from design, with Sijya approaching sound through texture, composition and the question of how something digital might acquire a physical quality.
Leather & Brass took that approach into a record built around distortion, density and emotional ambiguity. Its title draws from her family’s association with leather and brass manufacturing, while the music uses synthesis, pedals and analogue processing to give digital sounds a physical presence. Working with recording engineer Jay Panelia, Sijya used compression, slapback delays and mono reverbs to give her synthesised sounds weight and take some of the sterility out of digital production. Across the EP, abrasive electronics give way to slower atmospheric passages, with fragments and sketches developing into finished songs along the way.
A year later, Sijya has handed those songs to seven producers she admires, allowing them to take the stems apart and reconstruct the tracks according to their own instincts. Leather & Brass [Retrofitted], out via One Little Independent Records, brings together Molina, Ziúr, Rachika Nayar, Sneha Khanwalkar, The Blow, Jlin and OHYUNG, with each artist reworking one of the original tracks.
The EP’s focus track, I Only Want To Crash [Molina Edit], is also out, following the earlier releases of Safe [Sneha Khanwalkar Edit] and Do I Know [Rachika Nayar Edit].
The idea began much smaller. “Originally, my idea was to only have maybe one rework,” Sijya says, but when the team began reaching out, the response was far bigger than she expected. “We were so surprised to find that so many people were interested.” The list had begun as a collection of musicians whose work she admired, and the eventual lineup grew from that instinct. Only after putting it together did she realise that almost everyone involved was a woman or a non-cis male collaborator. The project has become a way for Sijya to bring together producers whose music she has spent years listening to, with each artist given the freedom to approach her songs on their own terms.
What makes the lineup particularly interesting is how differently these musicians approach electronic music. Sneha Khanwalkar, known for her work on Gangs of Wasseypur and her adventurous use of regional sounds in Indian cinema, appears alongside artists such as Jlin and Rachika Nayar, whose approaches to rhythm, guitar and electronic composition come from very different places. For Sijya, the divide between Indian indie and Bollywood has always been strange, and Khanwalkar’s involvement makes that porousness literal. “I think Sneha is one of the forerunners of experimental electronic music,” she says, adding that Khanwalkar was actually the person who first found her music.
Giving someone your stems sounds straightforward until the finished track returns carrying decisions you never made yourself. Sijya admits that receiving the remixes initially filled her with dread. “Sometimes it takes a few listens, because the shock of it is so much, because someone’s literally taken your baby and kind of put it together in their own beautiful Frankenstein-y way.” The image suits a project built around taking something familiar apart and assembling it according to a completely different set of instincts. For the person who made the original, the first listen comes with the added challenge of recognising a song while hearing somebody else’s interpretation of it.
Some of those reinterpretations have brought out qualities Sijya did not foreground herself. On OHYUNG’s remix of Turbine and Rachika Nayar’s rework of Do I Know, she heard tenderness and intimacy emerge from songs she had imagined on a much larger scale. Nayar’s version indulges the softer side of Do I Know, giving the track a different emotional emphasis. The experience has made Sijya think about the distance between writing a song and producing it. “The writing can be interpreted in so many ways,” she says. “It can go in wildly different directions. That’s quite a beautiful thing.”
Molina’s edit of “I Only Want To Crash”, the EP’s opening track, offers another route into Sijya’s writing. The original began as an instrumental skit before developing into a fragmented lyrical piece, with its deliberately simple words leaving room for ambiguity. Molina brings electronic production into conversation with guitar and more tactile instrumentation, giving the skeletal composition a different physical character. Across the seven edits, the original recordings provide a common starting point, but each producer gets to decide which elements deserve emphasis and which can be left behind.
Authorship gets interesting once the songs have passed into someone else’s hands. Sijya is willing to concede ownership of these versions almost completely: “All of these reworks are fully, in some ways more theirs than they are mine.” She admits that collaboration can make her self-conscious and inhibited. Handing over her work has offered an unusual freedom because the producers can make decisions without waiting for her approval or trying to preserve the intentions behind the original recordings. “They have the right to do whatever they want with it. They can destroy it. They can do whatever they want with it, basically, which makes it a truly free collaboration."
That freedom extends an instinct already present in Sijya’s own process. She has spent years treating music as material to be worked on, moving between design and sound, pushing digital production towards something tangible and building songs from fragments that could have remained fragments. Retrofitted applies that same instinct to authorship itself. Once the stems leave her studio, the songs can be rearranged according to somebody else’s logic, and the original recordings become a set of possibilities that no longer belong to her alone.
Control has become an interesting part of Sijya’s relationship with her music. She moved from designing the world around other people’s records to making her own, built Leather & Brass through sounds she could manipulate until they matched what she heard in her head, and has now given seven producers permission to take those recordings wherever they please. For an artist who began by shaping other people’s music visually before finding her own language in sound, Retrofitted opens up another way of hearing what she has made: through the instincts, obsessions and decisions of musicians she admired long before they touched her songs.
You can stream the EP here!
