Kabir Sethi

Delhi, India · b. 1995 · FARA Records

Kabir Sethi (b. 12 March 1995) is from Delhi, six years older than his duet partner, and it shows in the way he sings — he has been doing this long enough to have stopped hurrying. He came up through the unglamorous end of it: jingles, wedding circuits, session work, the odd advertisement, singing other people's songs correctly and on time for the better part of a decade. He doesn't describe those years as wasted and gets faintly irritated when other people do. He says it's where he learned to sing a line as written instead of as felt, which he considers the whole job.

He can pinpoint the moment he found his own sound, and it isn't a romantic story: twenty-four, in a booth, on a session, singing something forgettable — and he got one line properly, by accident, and the engineer looked up. He has been chasing that look ever since. His voice is warm, grounded and unhurried, with a low centre of gravity: where his duet partner has height, he has weight. And the crucial thing about his verse is that he isn't pleading. He arrives after she has sung an enormous chorus to an empty room, and his job isn't to rescue her, it's to confirm her. Nothing in the delivery should sound like relief.

Dry, funny and entirely without ego about the work, which people find disarming. He has been a session singer and has no illusions about being the point of anything. He defers to her on the record because she is on it first and it's her song until he arrives — and he says so without any visible discomfort, which is itself notable. Steady, dry, unbothered.