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Chasm. Corrosion. Completion — some words that come to mind after giving the 11 songs of 47 minutes on Meesha Shafi’s debut solo album a single listen.

Going over the album is like completing a cycle, it invites you to sit with your grief, spiral through it, and emerge, somehow, resolved. I say grief because I don’t hear pain in music anymore. I hear sadness, yes, at times a profound yearning, but mostly unresolved emotions put into words, incarcerated in a song and doomed to exist forever.

That is not the case with Khilnay Ko. I could not listen to it in one go — it took me three business days and a fight with a friend over some unintelligible emotions to really sit down with it. And then it sunk in, word by word.

“Saaye mein lipti hui, kahin bhool na jaoon, bani roshni se thi, ban dhool na jaoon [Wrapped in the shadows, I hope I don’t forget, I’m made of light, I hope I don’t turn to dust],” sings Shafi in ‘Azaab’. It took her over five years to complete this album. “Maybe even six,” she told me during our Zoom meeting. Her voice quivered, not out of fear but all the emotions she’d been feeling for a very long time. Her eyes wandered across the room, words struggled to leave her mouth like a lump stuck in her throat, yet, she resisted the urge to hold them back.

“I thought of naming it ‘Trigger Warning’,” she said. “I knew this was going to hit an emotional nerve somewhere across the 11 tracks.”

Over two decades, Shafi has traversed various artistic landscapes — Overload, Coke Studio, Hollywood — but she felt now was the right time to drop an album because she had something to say. And more importantly, she had an album in her. “I had a story to tell. I don’t mean to take away from songs that are light and entertaining. I love those too. But as a songwriter, I never wanted to do an album for the sake of it. I wanted to do it when I had it in me.”

The trauma behind Khilnay Ko

With a deeply collaborative spirit, Khilnay Ko boasts producers like Abdullah Siddiqui, Rohail Hyatt, Mahmood Rahman, and Shafi herself, each of whom has left a distinct fingerprint on its sonic tapestry. It melds electronic minimalism with classical motifs, grief with glitches, and poetry with percussive breath. What emerges is a fractured dreamscape, one that is by turns haunting, vulnerable, and defiant, offering a raw excavation of Shafi’s inner world.

For her, Khilnay Ko wasn’t just an artistic expression, it was a document of survival. The album also serves as a departure from her earlier, more upbeat work. When asked what inspired this shift in tone and energy — if it was something personal, or creative, or both — she said, “I think underneath the creative, it was personal. It was life, circumstances, experiences, struggle, alienation, mental health. It was — I was suffering.”

I was in a very dark place, very alone, but also in a sort of self-imposed exile. And that’s where it germinated from.“

Shafi addressed the elephant in the room, “I decided I will use my craft. It is a lot more rewarding. That… was traumatising.” Referring to the public and legal battles that have shadowed her every move over the past few years, she added, “But the trauma was real. It happened. I experienced it, and this is my recovery work. I started writing it to heal from that.”

And that recovery isn’t linear. The sonic motifs in Khilnay Ko — glitches, echoes, sudden ruptures — mirror the mind’s chaotic attempts at healing. “My mind started glitching,” she said of composing the title track. “I sent it to Abdullah Siddiqui and told him it’s philosophical and traditional, but also trying to be something new.”

Isolation runs deep through the sonic architecture of the album — most of it was recorded entirely alone. “I wasn’t performing when I was recording these,” Shafi said. “I recorded 99 per cent of the vocals by myself. I needed that safe space where I didn’t have to pretend to be strong or tough.” That privacy allowed her to preserve something most albums sacrifice: vulnerability.

“And I wanted the poetry to be front and centre, and build a sonic landscape around it,” she added. That’s where Siddiqui came in.

Her collaboration with Siddiqui is vital to the album’s atmosphere. While they’ve worked together before on ‘Magenta Cyan’ and the virally charged ‘Hot Mango Chutney Sauce’, Khilnay Ko is their most symbiotic expression yet.

Siddiqui’s production holds space rather than fills it, creating sonic chambers where Shafi’s words echo, flicker, and fade. Right off the bat, ‘Azaab,’ the album’s opening track, conveys a disruption in messaging, signalling words losing their value in this digital age. Shafi’s voice stretches across silences, searching for meaning in broken syllables.

There’s a specific moment that hasn’t left me: the transition from ‘Azaab’ to ‘Khushfehmi.’ We hear Shafi recall: “It was very overwhelming. I felt so many things. I became very unwell. I tweeted. I left. I immediately went to the airport. I took the flight. The pressure on my immediate well-being was very big. So I was totally overloaded. My capacity to process and, like took it a lot…” And then, immediately, ‘Khushfehmi’ a song about false hope begins to play.

Across the album, this tension between comfort and collapse recurs. One of my favourite moments is in ‘Faraar’, when Shafi sings, “Khabar uri thi ke hum faraar the, hum tou jang ke liye tayyaar thay [News spread that I was missing, but I was ready for war].” Goosebumps.

An interlude allows us to switch a channel, ‘Nirmal’ plays, deceptively gentle. At first, it feels like the album’s most commercial track, a calm in the storm, until it reaches that crescendo where everything kind of explodes and Shafi’s voice becomes almost inaudible amidst the sonic swirl.

“‘Nirmal’ was written as a self-soothing lullaby,” she explained. “There’s something about ‘Nirmal’s’ melody that reminds me of my maternal grandma, the kind of music she would listen to. That crackling old, that gramophone radio, analogue time. It reminds me of childhood, a time when I was safe. Its melody is coming from a place of nostalgia.”

As an adult, Shafi realised that sometimes you find your purpose or talent through whatever coping mechanism naturally flows to you, “like humming to soothe yourself”. “That’s kind of like a narrative that was going on in my head as my coping mechanism through these last seven years,” she added.

Recalling how she distracted herself from the “uglier things that were going on,” she revealed that ‘Nirmal’ was a reflection of that process. “It is that point in the album where you feel like everything is finally feeling a little sweeter, and prettier, and then you fall down the stairs and hit your head. It’s because you can’t keep pretending that everything is fine when it’s not. You realise you were in denial. It was toxic positivity.”

The visual representation

“I don’t like releasing independent work without visuals,” she told me. “As a visual artist, it feels incomplete. Also, visuals help the music reach more people. I didn’t want to make the songs more palatable — I wanted the visuals to honour the emotional honesty.”

So she turned to Awais Gohar, the filmmaker behind ‘Hot Mango Chutney Sauce’, to help bring that vision to life. “Each video uses a different filmmaking style. I wanted to employ the whole artistic tapestry to create a visual album. Awais is extremely sensitive and a deep thinker. I needed everyone who touches this work to understand what they’re working with — because the material is sensitive.”

The truth

The truth is that sensitivity is Khilnay Ko’s most radical act. The album refuses to conform to the neatly packaged expectations of South Asian pop. In ‘Sar e Aam’ — a classic Rohail Hyatt number echoing the aural DNA of Coke Studio’s formative seasons but with a sharper, more dangerous edge — Shafi takes every critique that’s ever been hurled her way and weaponises it. “Mein he behaya, mein he badchalan [I am shameless, I am evil],” she sings. It’s reclamation in its most melodic form, turning the shame assigned to her into an anthem of unflinching self-possession.

It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the whole album is Shafi’s rebellion at its most unfiltered. As Gohar’s visual interpretation lends its music bold and textured forms, while Siddiqui’s production stitches together its emotional spine, the three of them offer something far more lasting: a space to feel. A reminder that cracks are where light — and truth — enter.