From the ruins of ragaton to woozy synth minimalism — Pakistan’s most globally streamed voice returns with a record that asks what it means to begin again
The Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album is one of the most anticipated releases in South Asian music this year — a collaborative project with American drummer and composer Gregory Rogove that began as a follow-up to Pasoori and evolved into something far more personal, more experimental, and more philosophically grounded than anything Sethi has made before.
Pakistani-American artist Ali Sethi has teamed up with American drummer and composer Gregory Rogove on new collaborative album Room Jhoom, out May 22nd. The project was initiated back in 2023 as a follow-up to viral Pakistani hit Pasoori. As the songs evolved, the ragaton rhythms that Sethi had developed to bridge a gap between the South Asian and Latin American pop vernacular were replaced by woozy, minimalist synth phrases, sensual woodwind blasts and delicate pulses.
The Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album is not a sequel to Pasoori. It is a departure — from genre, from expectation, and from the version of Ali Sethi that a billion YouTube views created in the public imagination. It is an artist deliberately unstitching himself in order to find out what remains.
How the Album Was Made
The making of the Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album follows a process that is as unconventional as the sound it produced.
The duo’s sessions began with a programmed beat and a drone. Sethi would pick a poem and a raga and then sing over the track while Rogove structured motifs around the vocals. As the songs developed, the duo brought in a team of musicians: bass player Pete Randall, best known for playing with Adele; guitarist Gyan Riley; keyboardist Jay Israelson; film composers Saunder Jurriaans and Danny Bensi; Jordan Katz on horns; plus guitarist Ria Modak and oud player Eva Lawitts.
The result is a record that feels simultaneously ancient and entirely contemporary — built on the foundation of classical Hindustani ragas but clothed in textures that belong to no single tradition. The Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album sits in a sonic space that resists easy categorisation, which is precisely the space its creator has always been most comfortable inhabiting.
Rogove, whose own discography spans Latin Grammy-winning collaborations, film scoring, and work alongside artists including Devendra Banhart and Unknown Mortal Orchestra, brought to the sessions a musician’s ear for structure that complemented Sethi’s instinct for poetry and vocal improvisation. The two had worked together before — Rogove contributed to Sethi’s 2023 EP Paniya and the album Intiha — but the Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album represents the deepest collaboration between them yet.
The Meaning Behind the Sound
The Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album’s central theme — relearning the lessons of the past — is not an abstract artistic statement. It is a deeply personal one, shaped by Sethi’s own experience of moving between cultures, languages, identities, and musical traditions throughout his life.
Sethi describes one track’s lyric as tantric psychedelia, explaining that it describes a visitation that transforms and transports the heroine into a state of pure rapture. The looping synth and lush string-section that ultimately pierces it are like a life-changing encounter and its mystical aftermath — a self transfixed is a self unstitched.
That phrase — a self unstitched — captures the emotional architecture of the entire record. The Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album is not about holding onto what has been learned. It is about discovering which lessons were worth keeping, which ones were inherited without examination, and which ones need to be taken apart and rebuilt from the beginning.
Sethi is noted for his ability to blend Hindustani classical ragas with contemporary Western arrangements and for his flair for lending new-age contours to older melodies. His teacher, Ustad Naseeruddin Saami, rooted him in the understanding that Hindustani classical music emerged not from purity but from pluralism. Sethi recalled: He showed me that this music comes out of the multicultural melting pot that was precolonial India — all the way back to the 13th century.
That understanding — that tradition is always already a mixture, never a pure origin — runs through the Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album as both a musical principle and a life philosophy.
Jhoom — A Word That Carries History
The title of the Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album places it in an immediate sonic and cultural conversation that extends well beyond Sethi’s own discography.
Jhoom — meaning to sway, to lose oneself in music, to be transported — is a word that carries deep roots in Sufi musical tradition. It describes the physical and spiritual state that qawwali and classical music aim to produce in the listener: a dissolution of the boundary between self and sound, body and breath, past and present.
The word also carries recent cultural resonance. The jhoom ali zafar album and the ali zafar jhoom jhoom tradition represent one lineage of how jhoom has been used in contemporary South Asian pop — as rhythm, as energy, as the particular abandon of a body given over to music. Sethi’s use of the word is both a nod to that tradition and a reframing of it — slower, more interior, more concerned with the quality of the sway than the volume of the song.
Where ali zafar jhoom jhoom leans into celebration, the Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album leans into something quieter and harder to name — the feeling of returning to something you thought you had left behind and finding it rearranged by time.
Where This Album Sits in Ali Sethi’s Discography
The Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album arrives at a moment in Sethi’s career when the pressure to repeat Pasoori could easily have defined everything that followed it.
Pasoori became the first Pakistani song to feature on Spotify’s Viral 50 Global chart, eventually climbing to the top of the chart. With over one billion views on YouTube Music, it is currently the most watched Coke Studio music video of all time.
Rather than chasing that scale, Room Jhoom follows Sethi’s collaborative project with Nicolás Jaar, Intiha, and his first solo album, last year’s Love Language— a discography that reads as a deliberate exploration of different artistic partnerships rather than a conventional solo career build. Each album has been made with a different collaborator, in a different sonic register, addressing a different emotional territory.
The Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album is the most adventurous of these collaborations yet — the one that moves furthest from the melodic traditions that made Sethi’s voice famous and closest to the minimalist, atmospheric territory that experimental music occupies.
Quotes
“A self transfixed is a self unstitched.” — Ali Sethi, describing the emotional territory of Room Jhoom
“Sufi poems and metaphors revel in ambiguity, undoing such binaries as sacred and secular, male and female, spiritual and material. In that sense I think they are like this incredible technology of the heart — one that can help us do dialogue across difference in this highly polarized time.” — Ali Sethi
“He showed me that this music comes out of the multicultural melting pot that was precolonial India — all the way back to the 13th century.” — Ali Sethi, on his teacher Ustad Naseeruddin Saami
“Pasoori — a love song, a bit of a flower bomb thrown at nationalism, a queer anthem, a protest song, a power ballad and a song of togetherness.” — Ali Sethi, describing his most famous work
Impact
For South Asian music globally, the Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album represents a continued argument that the tradition-innovation binary is false — that the oldest ragas and the newest synths can inhabit the same space without either cancelling the other out.
For Sethi’s international audience — which expanded enormously after Pasoori and his 2022 inclusion in Time magazine’s Time 100 Next list — the album offers a portrait of an artist who refuses to be defined by his most viral moment and insists instead on the slower, harder work of genuine creative evolution.
For the jhoom ali zafar album conversation and the wider tradition of jhoom as a musical concept in South Asia, the Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album adds a new layer of meaning to a word that has always meant more than it literally says — making it the starting point for a record about memory, return, and the particular courage required to unlearn what you thought you knew about yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Ali Sethi famous for?
Ali Sethi is particularly associated with the ghazal format of singing and is often hailed for attempting to revive the ancient art form by experimenting with it and repositioning it as a young person’s genre. He is noted for his ability to blend Hindustani classical ragas with contemporary Western arrangements. His most recent single for Coke Studio, Pasoori, became the first Pakistani song to feature on Spotify’s Viral 50 Global chart, eventually climbing to the top, and with over one billion views on YouTube Music it is currently the most watched Coke Studio music video of all time. Beyond music, Sethi is a Harvard-educated author whose debut novel The Wish Maker received significant critical acclaim, and a cultural commentator whose work has been covered by The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Time magazine.
What is Ali Sethi’s gender identity?
Ali Sethi came out as queer during Pride Month, sharing a childhood photo on Instagram with the caption: hi little one. I know it’s hard sometimes when they tell you to not be you, but the very thing that makes you different will become a source of tremendous beauty and power. Love awaits.Sethi is among the very few openly queer artists in South Asia. He is often seen wearing skirts and flowing tunics in a bid to experiment with traditionally feminine silhouettes and androgynous styling, making him an important figure in South Asian queer fashion. Through songs, poetry and fashion, Sethi has challenged the binaries associated with gender, nation and genre.His use of Sufi poetry — which has historically embraced gender ambiguity and mystical dissolution of identity — allows him to explore these themes both explicitly and through layers of metaphor that resonate across audiences with very different relationships to the subject.
Where does Ali Sethi live?
Sethi is a naturalised American citizen, making him a dual citizen of Pakistan and the United States. He resides in Manhattan, New York. Despite living in New York, Sethi maintains deep ties with Lahore — the city of his birth — and with Pakistan’s cultural and musical traditions, which remain the primary source material for his art. His partner, artist Salman Toor, is based in the same city. Sethi regularly performs at major international venues including Carnegie Hall and the Royal Geographical Society, while also engaging with the South Asian community in New York through cultural and political events.
Conclusion
The Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album arrives with the weight of a billion-view legacy and the ambition of an artist who has no intention of being defined by it.
It is a record about the lessons the past teaches — not the ones we memorise and repeat, but the ones we have to take apart, sit with, and reassemble in order to understand what they were actually trying to tell us. The raga is still there, underneath the synths and the woodwinds and the minimalist pulses. The poem is still the starting point. The voice is still unmistakably the same voice.
But the Ali Sethi Rhoom Jhoom album asks what it sounds like when that voice stops performing what it knows and starts discovering what it does not yet understand.