From Nongbah to National Fixation: How Rapper Reble Built Indian Hip-Hop’s Fiercest New Voice

A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, A RAPPER FROM THE Northeast started colonising my feed. Short hair, diamonds catching the light, ice on every knuckle, staring down the lens. The videos had that gothic, black-and-white menace. I was, frankly, intrigued. So I did what the algorithm wanted and started listening.

Then Dhurandhar happened. Aditya Dhar’s blockbuster put her clipped, glacial verses on a soundtrack heard bymillions and she became a national fixation—11.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, north of 150 million streams, a bidding war, a deal with Atlantic Records. The persona was airtight: badass, iced-out, untouchable.

And then you get her on a call, and the whole thing quietly dismantles itself. Ask Reble where she feels most at home—on a festival stage in front of thousands, or in the studio with a half-finished verse—and she picks neither. “I feel most at home,” she says, “when I’m alone.” When we speak, she’s in Guwahati, deliberately between things, planning to vanish into the music for a while. The badass on the screen and the person on the phone are not, it turns out, the same woman. Daiaphi Lamare, the 24-year-old from the West Jaintia Hills who raps as Reble, has built one of Indian hip-hop’s most combustible new voices out of exactly this gap. And she has no intention of closing it for you.

THE WEIRD GIRL IN THE CORNER

Born in Nongbah, Lamare grew up moving—Shillong, Guwahati, then Bengaluru for a civil engineering degree she now describes like a detour. Music was ambient everywhere. “The Northeast loves rock music—Guns N’ Roses, Scorpions, Avril Lavigne, Sum 41, they were all huge,” she says. Her elder brother handed her the Wu-Tang Clan and, with it, a door. “He showed me there’s commercial hip-hop, sure, but there’s also this underground stuff that’s so cool and niche.”

From there it cascaded—André 3000, Tupac, Biggie, Aesop Rock and above all Eminem, whose Marshall Mathers LP landed on her. “I was like, whoa—this person is just like me. I’m not alone,” she recalls.

She needed the company, because she wasn’t finding much of it elsewhere. “Young Reble,” she says, laughing softly, “was always by herself. No friends. Sitting in one corner. Everybody was like, who’s that weird girl?” Teachers found her difficult. She hated routine, hated being told what to do, disliked authority on principle. The loneliness didn’t break her. Rap was where it went. “Hip-hop speaks for people who feel left out,” she says. “There’s the underdog story. There’s struggle.” For a girl from a minority community who never felt she fit, that was her language.

She started writing at 11 or 12, convinced it couldn’t be that hard. By 13 she’d cut a first demo—”very corny stuff”—burned it onto CDs and went door-knocking at radio stations and handing copies to local shops for free. There were almost no takers. Eventually Shillong’s small rap fraternity took notice and a DJ named Knack, then D’Mon of the pioneering group Khasi Bloodz, took her in.

Her first official release came in 2018, aged 16, when Shillong hip-hop collective Symphonic Movement invited her onto a track called “Play It Out Loud.” “I didn’t want to use my actual name because my parents weren’t very supportive of music initially.” She hears that early work now with zero sentimentality. “It was so trash.” This is a recurring theme with Reble, who is her own harshest critic by a wide margin: “Eighty per cent of the shit I’ve made, I hate it. But that just gives me the motivation to do better.”

The stage name Reble debuted in Bengaluru and it came, improbably, from Robert Louis Stevenson. Reble is Hyde to Lamare’s Jekyll—the vessel for everything the polite version isn’t allowed to say. “It’s a projection of certain emotions— ego, anger, rebellion. You can express them in a toxic way or a healthy way. And the healthy way is to do it through art.” The name isn’t a costume so much as a pressure valve. In “Reble mode,” she says, a superiority complex switches on—cocky, untouchable, gloriously indifferent to what anyone thinks. “That’s when I really don’t care about anything. It’s like playing a character for a movie. Sometimes you can get pretty lost in it.”

Her 2019 single “Bad”, produced by D’Mon, was the first shot fired under the new name—raw, Eminem-indebted, built around a line she’s kept as a personal creed: she’d rather fight the blazing sun than stay forever stuck in the shade.

THE POET WHO SAYS SHE CAN’T WRITE

Here’s a contradiction she wears comfortably: the rapper celebrated for her lyricism insists she isn’t much of a reader. “I don’t read books,” she says matter-of-factly. The exception came at school, where she unexpectedly fell for poetry.

She remembers being drawn, of all people, to William Wordsworth—particularly the Lucy poems. And she writes rap the way she read verse—not through the usual scaffolding of sports and movie references, but as abstraction. “I like to write like I’m writing poetry.”

She knows it can lose people. “A lot of people look at the Mona Lisa and they’re like, what the f**k is this even?” she says, cheerfully placing herself in that lineage of the not-immediately-legible. It’s the same instinct that runs through her catalogue, from the future-self perspective of “Changes” and the alter ego of “Jane” on her 2022 EP Entropy, to “New Riot”, the 2025 single—a Deftones-inflected howl of phonk and distorted synth—that she performed at the inaugural Indian edition of Rolling Loud, the world’s biggest hip-hop festival. “Riot means saying, ‘F*** it,’“ she said at the time. “It’s my rebellion against being normal.”

For all that Dhurandhar did for her numbers, Reble is clear-eyed to the point of coldness about what it actually was. “It feels like a temporary spike,” she says. “A good spike. The people in that room gave me a chance and I’m forever grateful. But I still need to work my way up.” She won’t let a Bollywood placement become her identity; she’s picky about what she lends her voice to and plans to stay that way.

The success brought the internet’s uglier reflexes with it: accusations of selling out and, more bizarrely, of being anti-Christian or Satanic. “When you get commercial success, people think you sold your soul,” she shrugs. Her May single “Praying Mantis”, her first independent release of 2026, came straight out of that frustration—though she’s quick to deflate any grand reading of it. “I never thought about it too deep. I like making hip-hop in a fun way.”

That refusal to romanticise—her own struggle, her own art, her own significance—is the most Reble thing about her. She’s one of very few women rappers from the Northeast, but she declines the weight of the banner. “I just want to make music.” She has no patience for lineups that book women as garnish—”I’m not filler, I’m a headliner”—and points to Nicki Minaj and Doechii, artists nobody discusses in terms of gender because they simply meet the standard.

Ask for her favourite song of her own and she responds flatly: “None.” She refuses to budge and says she doesn’t like anything once it’s out, which is precisely what keeps her making the next one. Somewhere over the fog of Shillong, a girl who never fit in learned to turn that friction into fuel before the rest of India was listening. Now she’s got the country’s attention and a room of her own to disappear into. But she’s still not going to explain herself to you.

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