The Indian rap-scape has always been interesting — spitting out admixtures of control and creativity that you do not usually envision, but which do eventually make sense to you in terms of lucrativeness, if you spend two cents of thought into it. One such collaboration – is the Lehar Chandigarh Mixtape. A press release states, “The Lehar Chandigarh Mixtape brings together 19 rappers across 10 tracks performed in Hindi, Punjabi, English and Haryanwi. Each song carries its own identity yet ties together into a common narrative of raw, unfiltered expression. Executive-produced by Navjosh Singh (Head of A&R, Mass Appeal), this project represents the first time a major music company has partnered with a whole underground Hip Hop collective to release a full-length project. Every contributor – from the artists and producers to the art director, shooters and EPs – is from Chandigarh, making this a true homegrown movement.”
The project is audibly a cypher product — you do not hear anything that proves the counter. Most of the music on the mixtape ebbs and flows confrontationally, and the production is meant to complement that – and spans 10 songs and roughly 30 minutes. The mixtape takes cues from 90s trap, and a number of tracks do battle rap emulations which arguably form the more interesting core of the record. The record chooses to prioritize on the cadences and the rapping of the artists — rather than providing complicated soundframes, and in a way, it is functionally a retrospective, because a lot of the tonality is located in direct derivation from early DIVINE / Gully Gang-esque strategies. This does not mean that the crew have submerged their identities completely into the old, the lyricism is rooted firmly in 2025 — with tongue in cheek samples (“level sabke niklenge”), and just simply – in terms of lingo.
Lehar Cypher, over time, has produced multiple viral moments over the past few years. Freestyles from The Ranjha and Meaow have been shared by Will Smith, Erykah Badu, Ebro Darden, Lil Duval and more. The Ranjha’s Muqabala freestyle alone racked up 50M+ views and was featured by Complex and The New York Times. It is therefore quite subversive that they have not relegated themselves to the hook machinery yet – and the mixtape has numbers like Shinobiz (possibly one of the best tracks on the project) — with conVith and Da Mirror going head to head. Star is another standout – where Poetic and Meaow switch among English, Hindi and Punjabi — with the latter slightly being reminiscent of a perhaps more hip-hop oriented Raja Kumari.
The mixtape has its ebbs and flows, and at some points it hits its creative lulls — where it becomes directionally predictable. You can also contemplate the sheen that the project has acquired — something that inevitably happens in label-cypher interactions, and the kind of filtration it has gone through, and whether some of the more necessary rough edges have been smoothened out for a global product. However, this collaboration does open up dimensions in terms of on-ground music movements and larger organizations and it is heartening to see freestyles in an oversaturated cloud-trap economy. One can forecast several branchings of successes off this mixtape, it would only make sense to look out.
