Tum Ho

Mahak Qayyum is one of my favorite recent low-fi pop artists. Her music is defined by percussive guitar playing, and vocals that sound like they’ve been recorded from a distance. The melodies are wonderfully accessible but the recording technique is definitely not. The combination of those two means that while the song is easy enough to listen to, you have to try a little bit to hear the exact words, and as a result you get sucked in. Most of her songs start with finger picking on an acoustic guitar, and eventually build to some sort of crescendo through fervent guitar strumming. You get the feeling that even she might not know how good she is.