From the hypnotic pulse of “This Hunt” to the cinematic scope of her forthcoming album, VANDANA stands as one of the most visionary voices in today’s avant-pop landscape. Born in India and now based in Brooklyn, she has built a sonic world where opposites collide, where the ancient meets the futuristic, the intimate blends with the industrial, and the sacred intertwines with the mechanical.
With her concept of ancient futurism, VANDANA explores how desire, ego, and fragility intersect in a culture obsessed with exposure. Her latest single, inspired by the night-blooming cereus—a flower that blooms once a year, only at night—turns this fleeting beauty into a metaphor for art, survival, and resistance. In this conversation, she reflects on her creative roots, her process, and the search for meaning in an age of overexposure.
Photos / Elisabet Davidsdottir
Your music blends art-pop, alternative electronica, krautrock, and even classical, creating a sound that’s hard to categorize. How did you develop such a diverse and unique style?
I’ve never been keen on creating music around genre; it feels like a small frame for something that starts as instinct. I usually begin with a feeling or a visual, and then hopefully it leads me somewhere unexpected. The tools I reach for—analog synths, piano, drum machines, and my voice—are extensions of that impulse.
Growing up in India, my ears were steeped in Hindustani classical and Bollywood music, both so rooted in emotion and improvisation. There was little cultural crossover for me personally, so when I later discovered Western experimental music like Miles Davis, Kraftwerk, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass, it was like someone had handed me the keys to another planet. London in those years was a collision of rave culture, art-school chaos, and strange avant-garde beauty everywhere, and it definitely rewired how I thought about sound and art.
So my sound isn’t curated so much as absorbed. It’s me collecting fragments from the worlds I’ve lived in and the ones I still imagine. Maybe that hybridity comes from being between cultures for most of my life, never fully belonging to one sonic or geographic home. It’s disorienting and challenging at times, but that’s the fun part. Disorientation tastes better than certainty anyway.
Let’s talk about your new single, “This Hunt,” which is inspired by the night-blooming cereus flower. What did you find in that metaphor that resonated with your artistic vision?
I think a lot about what it means to create in a culture obsessed with overexposure and output. The Cereus exists on the opposite end of that spectrum. It’s an act of quiet rebellion. The waiting, the devotion, the impossible full bloom that refuses the rhythm of consumption. Art, like nature, has its own mysterious timing.
This past year, that metaphor turned visceral. My partner and I have stared down mortality more times than anyone should have to; each encounter reshaping our sense of purpose and tenderness. Last September, he almost didn’t make it. And then, to keep things interesting, just as I was gathering myself back again, a metal stand fell on my face at a shoot a few months later. Alan Chadwick said that “the whole miracle of the garden is made up of secrets.” I think he was speaking to that quiet kind of faith, to be open to the mystery of life.
This Hunt grew out of that space. A reminder that fragility and strength often wear the same face, just under different light, and that joy, no matter when she arrives, deserves to take over completely. The night-blooming cereus was a guiding metaphor—both a warning and a longing for the return of slowness, mystery, and the courage to exist outside the algorithm.
The lyrics “This Hunt” are full of rich metaphors. What messages or ideas were you aiming to convey through them?
This Hunt came from observing how our appetites for success, validation, and even beauty turn predatory. The lyrics move between the personal and the collective – ego, pride, desire, the need to consume and be consumed. Lines like “This cruel hunt / You never ask for it” and “This insatiable hunt / This Faustian bargain” speak to that strange human contradiction, where we chase what ultimately has the capacity to bruise us. The song asks what this endless hunt costs us and, by extension, what it costs the natural world that mirrors our restlessness.
Musically, “This Hunt” has an industrial style and a ceremonial atmosphere. What sonic references or influences guided you to arrive at this sound?
This Hunt began as an 18-minute drone I created on the Sub37, more ceremony than composition. It came from a place of wanting to step outside conscious thought, to create without destination. Of course, I couldn’t let that be as is; I wanted to collide that stillness with something more physical and industrial – the sound of machinery breathing inside a sanctuary.
I was thinking about the kind of tension you find in film scores by Jonny Greenwood or Mica Levi- music that’s both human and alien, raw and meticulous. There’s also a trace of the mechanical propulsion of Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s work for Ex Machina or Annihilation, where beauty and menace share the same frequency. Also, Bowie, Bowie, Bowie. I listen to one Bowie song every day.
For me, This Hunt exists in a similar cinematic limbo, a world both sacred and mechanical. It’s about immersion, about surrendering to a sonic ritual that feels alive, unstable, and strangely human.
You come from India, lived in London, and now live in Brooklyn. How does this life journey influence the identity of your music?
My movement between three very different worlds wired me to love paradox. I’m drawn to extremes: the seductive and the menacing, beauty and distortion. There’s rarely a middle ground, and that keeps me honest. I don’t like to water things down, emotionally or sonically. I’d rather make something raw and polarizing than polite. Contradiction feels like home.
“This Hunt” is just a prelude to your next album. What can we expect from that full-length work, and how does it connect with this first preview?
I’ve been waiting my whole life to make this record. It feels like the most complete expression of who I am, both as a human and as an artist. The songs began in their simplest form: voice, words, and a Wurlitzer, recorded as voice notes. Those sketches became the emotional core of the album.
I’ll leave some mystery intact. This Hunt is the gateway drug – the album goes deeper. It’s raw, exposed, and a little shameless. But it’s full of heart and maximal intensity.
You worked closely with producer Marius de Vries on this album. What was that collaboration like, and how did his creative approach influence the final sound?
Working with Marius has been an exhilarating exchange. He arrives with decades of experience, from film scores to genre-defining records, yet in the studio with me, he treated each idea as fresh, gloriously audacious, and unafraid of the dark or the weird. His openness to experiment meant we invited each other into our wild sonic zones rather than one of us following the other. He’s an intuitive, curious scientist.
Alongside him, working with musicians who are singular in their crafts—players who bring not just skill but spirit—reminded me that good songs happen when you let the pure joy of music move you. That kind of play doesn’t polish; it reflects you back.
Finally, what do you hope the listener will experience when immersed in “This Hunt”? Is it more of a ritual, a warning, or a celebration?
We’re living through an age of overexposure and collapse. Everything is spectacle, everything is extractive. Power hunts attention, and attention hunts us back. This Hunt lives inside that loop. It’s about the human appetite for domination, the way ego and desire metastasize into systems—political, technological, and personal.
I wrote it while watching the world convulse, personally and collectively. Democracy rotting in real time, truth auctioned off to the highest bidder. We talk about collapse as if it’s happening to us, but we’ve built the scaffolding for it. We handed over the power, and now we’re shocked to see the wreckage.
So yes, the song is all three: ritual, warning, and celebration. Ritual, because it’s about remembering what’s sacred within. Warning, because that sacredness is under siege. And celebration, because despite everything, we’re still capable of awe. We’re still capable of beauty that refuses to serve power.
So, between machinery and mysticism, VANDANA crafts a world where fragility and force coexist. As she prepares to unveil her upcoming album, her vision of ancient futurism feels not only relevant but necessary. A reminder that even in the digital storm, beauty still blooms, even if only for a night.
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