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Ali Sethi is back. The singer behind the smash-hit ‘Pasoori’ is treating fans to a new full-length album partly-inspired by the single he sang with Shae Gill in 2022.

Room Jhoom, a collaboration between Sethi and American drummer and composer Gregory Rogove, started as a full-length follow-up to the song, but has since evolved into a fusion piece of both of their styles — soft Sufi for Sethi and fast-paced Caribbean for Rogove. It is expected to release on May 22.

In an Instagram post detailing the thought process behind the album, Sethi had a lot to say about his journey so far through life. He said he had spent his his past in the pursuit of precision, believing “truth and beauty were external, somewhere over there and all I had to do was strive hard enough, practice long enough, to get there”.

This, he said, made him neglect what was within himself and only changed once he paid heed to an inner voice asking him “to seek freedom, to lay roots in new soil [and] to pin my hopes on a new horizon”.

The singer regretted how deviation from established norms and practices was one of the greatest taboos in his culture and especially in the Indian music traditions he followed, but said, “at this point, to don the garb of disrepute and step into the proverbial wilderness was a matter of survival”.

That is where Room Jhoom got its life from, a fusion of East and West made possible due to Sethi’s exposure to and interaction with Western musicians who encouraged him to bend the rules that defined his ragas in the past.

He said the music contained in the album was all about trust, trust in the process of collaboration and in his own intuition.

The album is the singer’s second, after his debut Love Language dropped in August. Sethi described it at the time as an album, but also a cabaret and a mehfil. Keeping with the theme of taking inspiration from his past, Sethi said all three forms had deeply influenced his imagination growing up.