With her latest indie-folk EP, Phoolon Sa Dil, indie singer-songwriter Tanmaya Bhatnagar does what she has always done with her music: sing with vulnerability and look inward with honesty. It comprises five tracks — ‘Kinaare’, ‘Noor’, ‘Supriya’, ‘Zindagi’, and ‘Phoolon Sa Dil’. Released in late September, it carries many shades of emotion — from feeling loved, to the grief of loss, to the quiet joys of living.
Written during her pregnancy, after relocating from Delhi to Germany, Bhatnagar says the record became an intimate time capsule of everything she was feeling then. “These five tracks were everything I wanted to say,” she adds. “I’m glad I wrote it when I did. Maybe 20 years from now, I’ll look back and remember exactly how I felt during these months.”
A song born first
From her 2020 breakthrough single ‘Kya Tum Naraaz Ho?’ to her new EP, Bhatnagar’s discography has always mirrored her life. And unsurprisingly, motherhood sits at the heart of this project. Nowhere is this more evident than in ‘Noor’. Enveloped in gentle acoustic arrangements and carried by her soft, mellifluous vocals, ‘Noor’ became her first expression of maternal love — a connection that existed before touch.
For Bhatnagar, writing about someone who hadn’t been born yet — someone she was still creating — felt surreal. “I wrote ‘Noor’ to express how I feel about her, and how I will feel about her,” she says. “It marks the beginning of my motherhood journey — those intense feelings you have for your child, the connection, the love, even before meeting them.”
Although the track is deeply personal — part lullaby, part letter to her newborn — she believes listeners will still find their own way into it. “Everybody has a Noor in their life. It could be someone you love, a friend, a parent, even a pet — anyone who brings that pure, uncomplicated light,” she says.
Where grief lives
While ‘Noor’ carries the glow of beginnings and joy, ‘Supriya’ is about an ending, and loss. Named after her mother, the track confronts the ache of losing someone who is still alive but no longer reachable. “How do you process a loss when the person is still alive, but they are not there?” she asks. Bhatnagar, who first turned to songwriting as a way to articulate her grief, has been wrestling with that question since childhood, shaped by her mother’s long and ongoing battle with schizophrenia.
“I really miss my mom, but I can't tell her, and she can’t understand it. This song is me telling her, ‘Without you, I don’t know how I feel.’” Becoming a mother made the grief sharper, not softer. “I wasn’t just missing her as a daughter anymore. I was missing her as a new mom who needed her own mother.” For Bhatnagar, music has become the place where she sorts through her grief and the shifting seasons of her life, learning to hold both. “I will always write about this, because I know this feeling is going to stay with me forever,” she says.
An artist in transition
Having debuted as an independent artist in 2021, and after a two-year stint with Sony Music’s DayOne label beginning in 2022, Bhatnagar is now back to creating on her own terms — co-producing, adding layers, and widening her sonic palette while still holding onto the raw acoustic intimacy she’s known for.
Working with a label, she says, was a valuable learning curve — an inside look at how the industry functions and how labels collaborate with artists. And it has been both a challenge and a liberation. “As an independent artist, you’re your only support system. It’s incredibly empowering,” she says.
Bhatnagar now stays in Germany. The move marks a shift for her — a new chapter both personally and musically. The album, in many ways, feels like a quiet farewell to her home away from home, as she begins leaning into themes of belonging, displacement, and the ache of missing home. “Everything changes now — how I feel about myself in a different country, away from my roots,” she says. “It’ll be about trying to fit in, feeling like a child again, starting over.”
What comes next? “Tanmaya will always be this very raw and authentic indie-folk artist, because this is what I’ve loved all my life,” she says. She hopes to keep evolving within that space, while leaving room to experiment under another moniker someday.