We’re telling you now—Curtain Blue is the artist to watch out for at Lollapalooza India 2027
Bhatia spent long hours with his parents’ cassettes and vinyl records, singing along to Michael Jackson, ABBA and the Bee Gees. He began inventing lyrics when he couldn’t decipher the words, which marked the beginning of his songwriting journey. For all his interest in music, he never took a class, something he is oddly grateful for. “A lot of decisions that could technically be wrong feel really great when you write a song. You make mistakes that sound wonderful.”
After school, he went to university to study architecture and, as things go, wound up in a band instead. The Circus was born in a room of like-minded guys teaching themselves music production through YouTube. He reminisces about those days fondly. “It was the most exciting learning curve for all of us. When you have a room full of people who have one goal—understanding music production and talking ideas—it becomes a real family.”
That room and the sense of community it gave him would eventually lead to his solo act, Curtain Blue—also the title of Bhatia’s first song—named after a room with blue curtains in his Gurgaon duplex, which would terrify him at night. Although Bhatia has been experimenting with his sound since launching in 2013, the Indian instruments he loves, favours and is known for today only came into his orbit a decade later. While scoring Gaurav Gupta’s Paris show in 2023, he found himself laying classical sounds over his beats. “The brief was very interesting, and it opened me up to this world where you could mix the two. I started working with the sarod and the sarangi and mixing them with analogue synths. It just became my sound.”
‘Yeh Duniya’ is that sound at its clearest. Described as a “living room experiment”, the production brings together the harmonium, sarangi and Indian violin with electronic textures and vocal loops. It’s Bhatia’s first song in Hindi. The chorus organically surfaced mid-production; he sang it straight into a condenser mic in his studio, and the first take became the final take. “You can even hear the AC running in the background if you really listen. It was one of those songs that made itself.” An early snippet of the song posted in March, featuring Bhatia tinkering on the floor with a harmonium, was his first reel to take off on Instagram. “I wasn’t used to that kind of reaction. I’m so proud of that one because it’s an original composition and was never uploaded as a snippet that could potentially go viral.”
