Blending emotive melodies with modern production, the duo KhoslaRaghu from Mumbai has been carving a distinct space for themselves with music that feels intimate, relatable and deeply rooted in real emotions. Thy have dropped two songs – Bewajah and Mile Jo Sukoon – that are part of the album Aarzu that drops in first week of October.Aarzu explores different shades of love, tell us how the album came about?We didn’t really sit down and decide that we had to cover these emotions one by one. The songs naturally started coming together around different experiences and feelings. When we looked at them as a collection, we realised there was a common thread running through all of them. Love isn’t just one emotion, and we wanted the album to reflect that. Each song has its own space, but together they tell a bigger story.What made Bewajah and Mile Jo Sukoon the right starting point for introducing listeners to Aarzu?We felt both songs show two very different sides of what Aarzu is about. Bewajah has that excitement and restlessness of falling for someone, while Mile Jo Sukoon has a much more settled and emotional feeling to it. We wanted to give people a sense of the range of the album without giving too much away. There are still three songs left, and they take the story in different directions. So, in a way, these two were just the beginning of the journey.KhoslaRaghu has built its audience independently, without traditional label machinery. What have you learnt about finding and retaining an audience?You can’t really force people to connect with a song. You can put it out, but what happens after that is in the hands of the listener. A lot of our growth has happened through people sharing our music with their friends and coming back to our older songs. That kind of connection takes time, but it means a lot to us. We’ve always tried to focus on making music we genuinely believe in rather than chasing what might work for a particular moment.Your music brings contemporary pop together with the emotional depth of Indian music. What is generally the starting point for your songs?For us, the melody usually comes first. We often start with a melody or a musical idea that immediately creates a certain feeling, and then the story, lyrics and emotion develop around it. Once we have the melody, we explore what it makes us feel and build the production around that emotion. There’s no fixed formula beyond that—the melody is usually what gives us the starting point, and everything else follows naturally.Why Aarzu for the album name?Aarzu felt right because the word itself carries a lot of emotion. It can mean wanting someone, missing someone or simply wishing for something that may or may not happen. That feeling runs through all five songs in different ways. We also liked that it doesn’t limit the album to one kind of love story. Everyone has their own aarzu, and we wanted the title to leave that space for the listener.Is there anything about the independent music journey that you would not want to change even as the audience gets bigger?The freedom to make decisions based on what feels right for the music is something we’d definitely want to hold on to. We’ve always been able to take our time with a song and figure out what it needs. We’ve also grown alongside our listeners rather than trying to build something overnight. As the audience gets bigger, there will naturally be more opportunities and more expectations. But the friendship, the honesty between us and the way we approach the music are things we’d like to keep exactly the same.