From its first tone, Extern’s Bada Shauq pulls a familiar string of emotion we’ve all experienced. A slow, honest unpacking of the first song starts almost mimicking the heartbeat of heartbreak. In five stages of processing, the denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance, Extern has laid out a very vulnerable face of himself. Each track is like a ticket back to the moments where the pain was too loud to ignore and the only thing louder was the beat playing in his room.
Before the EP, there was the kid who danced to TV songs, copying moves that would later lead to melodies.
“I used to dance while mimicking the dance moves on TV, which brought the music to me,” Extern shares. “Then the van that used to take me to school always had music bumping in it… from there I discovered most of the music which made me aware that music doesn’t exist physically but still has so much weight in our life and gives us freedom to express.”
He began writing raps in ninth grade. By eleventh, he had his first complete song and was producing on FL Studio Mobile. But things changed after school. That’s when he found the local rap scene and started attending RHC cyphers. “That’s where I met Hyke, Hardbone, Sinash, The UD, Rapdas… the names I mentioned weren’t just music connections, we shared a brother-like bond.”
His debut track “302020” with Hardbone was eventually picked up by Nexa Music Season 3.
The Making of Bada Shauq
The seed for Bada Shauq was planted four years ago during his first major heartbreak. “It is the first of any kind of project that I made,” he says. “Almost 4 years back I had a heartbreak, that’s when this project started. I never forced anything, everything came to me naturally, whatever I felt.”
But life moved on. So did he — temporarily. “After a year I moved on from that thing so the project went on a big hold.” New music came, more shows with RHC, until another person came into his life and left him with even more pain. “That’s when I just kept writing my pain on beats and created Bada Shauq.”
The EP is not built on abstract emotion — it’s grounded in lived experience. “I loved someone so much that it was beyond my imagination… they broke my heart and really hurt me. I was barely getting out of my room,” he says. “It really took a lot of time and I’m still trying to move on from it.”
Track by Track
Kab The Tum opens with denial, where Extern asks, “Kab the tum mere?” as he struggles to process the loss.
Khudgarz is all heat — frustration at giving your all and being left with nothing.
Halaat finds him pleading for that person to stay, bargaining even when it’s over.
Maksad dips into depression, asking to be freed from the weight of it all.
Raakh, featuring Hardbone Boy, ends the project on a note of quiet closure.
“Hardbone and me were together from the beginning. We used to record all our songs in studios or mostly in my room on his mic,” Extern says. “Raakh was one of those tracks… we wrote the hook and verses together. And just at that moment it hit me — the last track of my EP should represent acceptance. This one fits perfect.”
Creating in Real Time
Extern’s writing process is intuitive. “I’m a very emotional and vulnerable person. I mostly like to write what I feel,” he explains. Sometimes it’s a beat he’s cooked up. Sometimes it’s from his producer friends. Or a YouTube dig. “When a beat hits a certain feeling or emotion in me that I want to talk about… then I start writing. The hardest part is figuring out the starting point. After that, it just flows.”
Whether he brings someone else onto the track or lets it breathe on its own is purely instinct. “It’s what my gut says in the moment.”
The title wasn’t planned — it was a moment of language and fate. “I googled ‘heartbreak meaning in Hindi’… it showed Bada Shok. I pronounced it wrong as Bada Shauq. But then I went into a deep thought — it is practically right. It is a big sorrow that not everyone can handle. It is a Bada Shauq.”
Heartbreak has always had a place in rap, and Bada Shauq walks that familiar path — but it does so with raw honesty and weight. These are songs that might just catch you off guard when you least expect it. I know I’ll be coming back to this EP.
