Bold And Boundless

Every festival season brings with it a fresh wave of genre-agnostic musicians, each more experimental than the last. GQ picks three favourites from the class of 2018 who’re leading lives as unorthodox as the music they’re playing

- Nidhi Gupta

TIENAS

HIP-HOP ARTIST

If you’ve watched Tanmay Saxena aka Bobby Boucher aka Tienas rap, you know just how fast he can spit. What you may not know is that he was born with a speech impediment. “I stutter,” the Mumbai-based rap wunderkind types over WhatsApp. “Not if I’m drunk and feeling like myself. But if I’m high and paranoid, I do.”

Tienas’ messages are littered with LOLs, like any other 22-year-old’s, but his lyrics are evidence of a rare worldly-wise outlook. On Unavailable, the 15-track mixtape he released on Delhi-based label Azadi Records this year, he muses on consumerism, mortality and exploitation. He flips off the suits who promise him “exposure”; he talks about claiming his riches; and he’s cheeky while he’s at it. On the standout track “18th Dec”, his voice stealthy and uninhibited, he keeps time with dramatic beats and operatic rhythms and features a verse that ends with “Did I, did I, did I just stutter that?”

At a recent Azadi Records showcase in Mumbai, Tienas’ penultimate set, right before AR-superstar Prabh Deep, saw a packed audience trying to rap along as he delivered “18th Dec” flawlessly. “People think it’s a gift,” he says on our chat, “but I’ve practised a lot since I started writing my own music in 2012. It’s natural to me; I rap in rhythm, I don’t talk in rhythm.”