Inside The Rise Of Indo Warehouse

Every generation produces a sound that tells it who it is. For a global South Asian diaspora raised on contradictions all over the globe, Indo Warehouse is starting to sound like that answer. Helmed by Kahani and Kunal Merchant, the collective has become one of the most consequential movements in contemporary South Asian music in under three years. They became the first South Asian electronic act to play Coachella. They sold out London’s Roundhouse. They turned a mandap into a DJ booth. And in the process, they named a genre that hadn’t quite existed before them: Indo House.

But Indo Warehouse does not behave like a brand, or even like a band. It behaves like a question. What would electronic music sound like if South Asian culture wasn’t treated as garnish, but as architecture? What happens when tabla and 4/4 kicks are not stitched together as novelty, but allowed to belong to each other?

To answer this, we go back to a beach in Mexico. It begins the way many modern myths do—at two in the morning, on a stretch of sand, with a man who doesn’t yet know he’s about to change the direction of dance music for an entire generation.

In 2020, Kahani—aka Armaan Gupta—was there, listening to a certain kind of house music he didn’t know how to describe yet. “My idea of electronic music was Swedish House Mafia, Afrojack,” he tells Esquire India, while in Mumbai for a recent show. “But this felt… emotional. Deep. I didn’t know how to classify it.” As the beat rolled in over the sand, something instinctive happened. “I started singing a qawwali over it in my head. And I thought—wow. It sounds great up here. Where can I find it?”

He couldn’t. So, he went looking.

Back in New York, Kahani tried convincing artists to explore the idea: South Asian vocals, rhythms and emotion embedded inside modern house music. The response, again and again, was hesitation. “They were like, ‘I don’t want to be too Indian.’ And I was like—what do you mean? Afro House exists. Latin House exists.

This is just another beautiful culture that is yours.” That’s when he reached out to Kunal Merchant—inviting him to one of the early test Indo House nights in New York, before the project even had a name.

ARE WE DOING THIS FOR THE MUSIC?

Already a fixture in New York’s DJ ecosystem, Merchant built a reputation for culturally attuned projects such as Jai Hov Beats, a 2021 EP that reframed Jay-Z through an Indian sonic lens, in collaboration with Music Without Borders and Soof.

He admits to being sceptical, initially. “I was like, you just want to throw a cool brown party. And I don’t really want to do that. For me, it was—are we really going to do this for the music?”

In the summer of that year, Merchant finally DJed of one the Indo House rooms himself. That night, they’d also brought in a DJ from India. “The crowd loved it. I thought, this is actually something,” says Merchant. Kahani was in India when people began asking what he was playing on Instagram stories. He decided to make a playlist and realised it needed a title. “That feeling was warehouse energy,” he says. “Open-ended. And before borders, this whole region was the Indo subcontinent. It wasn’t about countries—it was about people.”

AND SO, INDO WAREHOUSE WAS BORN

Both artists were raised in the US—Kahani in New York, Merchant in Houston—diaspora children who grew up toggling between cultures, accents and shifting ideas of belonging.

“We’ve gone through our own journeys as Indians growing up in America,” Merchant says. “And now, coming back here, there’s a lot we’re exploring inside ourselves. We see our community doing the same thing.” That sense of in-betweenness becomes Indo Warehouse’s engine. The early shows in New York were intimate, improvised. Two hundred people in a small room, then four hundred, then eight. “We stuck to New York for a year,” Kahani says. “We kept doubling in size.” By the end of the first year, they had jumped from hundreds to thousands.

What surprised them most was who was walking in.

“We’re bringing in people who aren’t even electronic music fans,” Merchant says. “They come out of curiosity. They catch the vibe. And then they keep coming back.”

But the sound is only half the story. The other half is spectacle. Not in the EDM sense of pyro and drops, but in the architectural sense: for Indo Warehouse, every show has a spatial idea.

“We never just take over a club and hit play,” Merchant says. “Every Indo Warehouse is different.” The duo focuses on the lighting, the visual, and even the live elements for their shows, which might range from bhangra dancers to full narrative concepts. “We kept it authentic to who we are,” says Kahani, adding, “One of our friends plays the dhol. I play the dhol. So we’re like—let’s do that together.”

This ethos reaches its clearest expression at Coachella. On the Gobi stage, Indo Warehouse arrived with a 40-person team—dancers, dhol players, visual artists. Their show was such a huge success that soon after Damian Lazarus signed them to Crosstown Rebels and booked them for Day Zero in Tulum.

Kahani says success has only sharpened their internal compass, not dulled it. That barometer governs everything—from track selection to production budgets.

“We really have to stick to what we actually believe,” he says. “Because we’ve been through it. We’ll be preparing for a show, deciding what to play tonight, and there’s always a pocket of time you need to fill. And that’s where you ask—what goes here? And if it feels off, we won’t do it.”

Their process mirrors that philosophy. Kahani hunts for what he calls “B-sides”—the forgotten tracks buried in iconic albums, melodies everyone knows without realising it. “Throw out the top two tracks,” he says. “What’s left? That’s where the magic is.” When those fragments surface inside a house groove, the effect is visceral: nostalgia without cliché.

The best example of that is one of their latest releases, “Bombay Acid”. Inspired by Charanjit Singh’s cult 1982 record Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, the track folds Raja Kumari’s vocals into deep, hypnotic house. It’s not entirely fusion; in Merchant’s own words, he calls it “a translation—futuristic, but also heritage.”

Dance music, Merchant says, allows for narrative. “You can take people on a journey. You can give them something they’ve never discovered. Or something they forgot they loved.” Hours before their Mumbai show at Dome SVP, they were finishing a new track. “We’re going to play it tonight. That’s the beauty of this,” he said, smiling.

Ask them about their most meaningful shows and the answers reveal their arc. Kahani names their last India tour at the Dome. “That’s the video I pull up,” he says. “Like—yeah. We did that.” Merchant points to Brooklyn Mirage, their first 5,500 person room, barely a year-and-a-half in. Then, London: seven hours, open to close, no openers. “When you have seven hours,” he says, “you can really tell a story.”

After India, they plan to stop.

“We’ve learned so much in three-and-a-half years,” he says. “We know what works. We know what we sound like. Now we want to put all of that into something beautiful and give it to people.”

By the time they step offstage in Mumbai that night, Indo Warehouse will have toured continents, rewritten expectations and turned nights into a dance ritual. They aren’t claiming a sound so much as unlocking one: a music born of lineage and diaspora. And if this really is the sound of a generation in dialogue with itself—well then, the story is only beginning.