Hakeem’s ‘Break Free’ Channels UK Garage Energy Into A Story About Emotional Freedom
Mohali-based singer-songwriter and producer Hakeem traces his journey from engineering student and Hindustani classical trainee to independent Punjabi musician through his debut album 'Smoke in the Woods', a six-track project shaped by R&B, pop, and UK garage influences. Built around themes of human experience, emotional release, heartbreak, and self-discovery, the album combines Hakeem’s self-produced sound with collaborations from artists like Harshit Sharma, Exit Exit, Vicky Kaler, and director Guntajdeep Singh, while the video for ‘Break Free’ uses performance art and movement to explore the difficult process of unlearning one's older self after love ends.
Mohali-based singer-songwriter and producer Hakeem has been a music enthusiast for as long as he can remember, listening to all kinds of music that came his way, though Punjabi music stayed closest to him. In 2012, during his first year of Computer Science Engineering, he picked up the guitar. One thing led to another. He started learning violin too, and spent the next three years training in Hindustani classical music while also going down YouTube rabbit holes listening to every kind of track he could find. One night, while listening to A. R. Rahman’s 'Chupke Se,' he became obsessed with understanding how those lyrics were written, and how the sounds were created. That curiosity pulled him into music production.
By the end of the third year of his CSE degree in 2015, he dropped out of the programme to pursue music full-time. He auditioned for KM Music Conservatory and completed a one-year foundation course in 2016. “During that year, I was completely cut off from my usual circle and surroundings and was fully immersed in music,” Hakeem tells us. “I was surrounded by people who were deeply into different types of music, which helped me explore vocals and music production even further.” When he returned home, he started writing songs with zero money, a MacBook, and whatever he had learned along the way. Slowly, he found his footing in the Punjabi music industry, creating music for different artists while holding onto a clear vision of himself as a singer-songwriter and producer. More than ten years of making music, while constantly learning how to make his sound better, has eventually led him to this, his debut EP ‘Smoke in the Woods’.
Harshit Sharma, a musician and friend based in Gurgaon, who has a strong understanding of music theory contributed guitars and keys on two tracks on the 6-track EP, most notably ‘Break Free’, for which Hakeem also brought in Exit Exit, a team based in the UK. He wanted the track to carry an authentic UK garage sound and have the song polished through their sensibilities, so they came on board for additional programming and mastering on two tracks from the album. ‘Break Free’ itself began during a jam session with fellow artist Vicky Kaler, who wrote the song, while Hakeem produced it himself, like the rest of the album. "The lyrics revolve around the liberation of a woman who has gone through heartbreak, and I felt that the UK garage sound did justice to that sense of freedom and release,” he notes. “You never know you are chained until you break free.”
When he later played the song to his friend Guntajdeep Singh, Singh immediately got excited and already had a vision for it, eventually directing the music video. Beyond just heartbreak, Guntajdeep wanted to explore the moment a person begins to unlearn themselves. “Because that is what a confining love does. It teaches you a version of yourself,” he notes. “It hands you a vocabulary for who you are, and you speak that language so fluently, so completely, that when the relationship ends, you are not only grieving a person, you are grieving an entire self you constructed in their presence. The unlearning of that, the stripping back, the returning to something truer, that is not this clean or triumphant thing, it is terrifying. It is also, eventually, the most alive one feels.”
In the music video for Break Free, that’s what performance artist Puneet Jewandah becomes a vessel for — a ritual of sorts to remember, process, and break through the connection with a loved one. “There is the simultaneous presence of fury and tenderness in her gestures, which embodies the feeling in the song so well,” shares Guntajdeep. “Her body lets go and then reaches back, because that is the honest truth of letting go — it is never singular; never clean. It happens in waves and reversals and then, finally, in one great exhale that you didn't know you'd been holding.”
Follow Hakeem here, listen to the album below and watch the music video at the top of the page.
If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:
In Lapgan & Baalti’s ‘Romance,’ The Akhada Becomes A Symbol Of Male Connection
Hooliganism’s New Music Video Featuring Subodh Kerkar’s Art Imagines A New ‘Land Of Love’
Horses, Highways, & Haunted Romances: 5 Homegrown Music Videos To Watch This Month
