The Influential Voice Charting A New Course In Pakistani Music

Walking into a relatively quiet café in Lahore, a bespectacled Abdullah Siddiqui is dressed all in black with a pair of headphones wrapped around his neck. He greets me shyly while pulling out a chair to sit down.

There’s a grounded energy about Siddiqui, with a tad of caution too. But more than anything, there’s a profound sensitivity about the young artiste, where he takes his time to absorb the environment that he’s in and the people that he’s with, gradually finding his comfort in participating. And perhaps that’s what stands out most about him.

Attributing his proclivity towards music to his parents and siblings, the 23-year-old reveals that it was his older sisters, in particular, who exposed Siddiqui to different music genres throughout his childhood.

“I always had an inclination towards music,” he says, “Even though, growing up, I was listening to a lot of pop music, my introduction to anything beyond pop came from them. I think on a philosophical level, it instilled a deep understanding of art and music in me at a very young age.”

Once he turned 11, Siddiqui began tinkering about and taking a stab at music production. Revealing with a grin that he was “obsessed” with the Disney Channel’s brand of pop, the artiste dreamed of making music just like that.

“I wanted to learn every song,” he states, mentioning that at the time, he was also learning how to play the guitar and began putting up little performances at home for his family and even at school.

A few years into his pursuit for making music, Siddiqui turned to his older brother who was a bit of a techie, hoping to receive a cutting-edge software that he could experiment making music on. The result? An obscure German digital audio workstation on a “janky, falling apart Windows machine.”

Siddiqui laughs recalling the anti-climatic moment.

“I was really expecting some kind of musical playground you know, like some kind of beautiful interface that would just complement my creativity! But all I got was this glorified spreadsheet.”

But then he softens, adding; “It was great. I began loving it. It gave me access to very rudimentary but effective tools for making something.”

A few years later, the artiste made a formal entry into Pakistan’s music scene by performing a 30-minute set at the Lahore Music Meet (LMM) when he was only 16-years-old. His single, Telescope Heart, went viral on CityFM89, a well-known national radio station.

“[The song] started making it to the station’s top ten lists every week and it stayed like that for a year,” he states.

“It was insane,” he fondly recalls. “It was unbelievable. I was getting calls from friends and relatives saying they had heard my song on the radio.”

When Siddiqui turned 18, his original electronic pop track, Resistance, released in 2018, was part of the line-up of Nescafe Basement’s fifth season the following year, in 2019.

The song shook up the music scene so to speak and currently clocks in at over 4 million views on YouTube.

In a short span of time the artiste has accomplished what many would perhaps take decades to achieve: he has released four albums (Metannoya, Heterotopia, dead Beat poets and dead Beats poets: side B), was the youngest associate producer for season 14 of Coke Studio, made it to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2021, worked with some of the biggest names in Pakistani music, spearheaded the movie score for Joyland, a critically-acclaimed film (which premiered at the 75^th Cannes Film Festival in 2022), including a string of recent local and international projects.

While Siddiqui may not be a household name yet, he sure is getting there.

“I never really believed that my music had any place in the mainstream,” he candidly states. “I think it’s because of what the mainstream music scene looked like in 2016 – 2017. I always thought I’d be confined to Indie music spaces.”

But Siddiqui chuckles when he looks back on how “chaotic” the past few years have been.

When asked about his creative music-making process, the artiste divulges that he has often yearned to be the sort of musician who can spontaneously create music on a whim.

Instead, he feels his approach to the process can be a tad too methodical which hinders the element of fun…a state of being needed for every creative before launching into a hazy-delicious flow state.

“This thing would start happening to me where the more introspective I’d get, the more I’d go down a rabbit hole. It can be tiring because sometimes, you’re not ready to look deeply inward all the time while writing songs,” he says. “But then I stop myself and question why I need my work to be so emotionally dense?”

The answer, he explains, led back to his relationship with art. Growing up in a “very intellectual” household, Siddiqui consistently felt duty-bound to justify his career in music by making it “extra deep and extra intellectual.”

“I think that’s why, on some level, I lost my ability to enjoy the process. Once I realized that, I was able to take a step back and find my inner child again.”

Speaking about the current music scene, Siddiqui finds that the influx of new musicians entering the local music scene is a very telling indication of the birth of a new industry.

“I remember when I was entering the music scene, the sort of advice I’d get from most people was; what industry, there’s no industry. That’s the sort of thing that scares a lot of people off. But the sounds coming out of the music scene today are wild,” he says.

Siddiqui believes that while the Pakistani music scene used to once feel “intimidating” for young artistes – primarily because of the fact that new artistes felt like they’d either have to have an immaculate voice or play an instrument like a maestro – the new music scene is entering an age where musicians are becoming more than just vessels for music.

“[Our] musicians are now becoming people that listeners have a relationship with. They have a style, a narrative. What’s speaking to you is not the riffs and runs in their voice. What’s speaking to you is their narrative. What’s speaking to you is their honesty. And so now, I think a lot more [new artistes] are realizing; oh, we have something to say! So whether or not we’re classically trained, there’s enough space in the industry, in the craft of music, for us to find a way to say it. And I think that is really indicative of the fact that we’re in a really good place. After a long time, I feel like we’re in a good place.”