Revival: How Naya Beat gave lost South Asian music a second life
At a famed Los Angeles underground dance party, two DJs and record collectors traded stories about the strangest South Asian records they knew. Not the famous film songs, but the ones that slipped through the cracks. Pressed in small numbers, passed between families, buried in dusty shops and forgotten crates. By the end of the night, they realised they were chasing the same ghosts.
That realisation became Naya Beat.
Founded by Raghav Mani and Filip Nikolic, the label began as a mixtape. It soon turned serious. Raghav had a personal connection with Indian music through his Delhi-rooted parents. Filip came from outside, pulled in by Remo Fernandes’ “Jungle Days”, an oddball Goan synth-pop track that opened Indian music up for him. What they found was not a footnote. It was a missing lane of South Asian dance music.
Take Punjabi Disco. In 1982, Mohinder Kaur Bhamra and her son Kuljit went into a London studio with a Roland SH-1000 synth, a CR-8000 drum machine and an impossible idea: Punjabi vocals over electronic dance music. Scarcely pressed, poorly distributed, lost for forty years. When Naya Beat brought it back in 2025, it did not feel like nostalgia. It felt like proof the future had been sitting in a box all along.
The thread runs through Pinky Ann Rihal’s Tere Liye, Manjeet Kondal and Deepak Khazanchi’s bhangra-house experiments, and renewed work around Asha Puthli. These artists moved through disco, boogie, synth-pop, house, dub and street soul before most South Asians knew those sounds.
The world has caught up. Naya Beat Volume 1 was The Vinyl Factory’s number one reissue of 2021. Volume 2 topped the same list in 2024. Punjabi Disco was a Pitchfork Best New Reissue and among The Guardian’s ten best global albums of 2025. Gilles Peterson, Peggy Gou and Solomun championed it; Resident Advisor and Mixmag have followed suit.
Now, Raghav and Filip are working on an original album for next year, proof Naya Beat is not simply archival. For decades, these artists were treated as regional curiosities. Naya Beat hears them differently. The work is archival, yes, but also restoration: returning artists to the history they helped shape.
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