alking to Misbah (Syed Misbah Uddin, better known as Misbah) is like talking to an old friend. Our conversation doesn’t begin with his music outright. We talk about the heatwave in the UK and across Europe, the once-green parks in London that have dried out, the indie music scene in Pakistan and why music groups are no longer as prominent as they once were. We discuss the beautiful songs of Dulhay Mian and Tarbooze, Pakistan Idol versus Coke Studio, controversial labels, growing censorship in Pakistan, the rise of rap music and plenty more, some of which stays off the record.

There was a point when Misbah’s music career in Pakistan had stalled. He’d played in bands, built a studio, produced for other artists, made videos and played shows, but couldn’t make enough money from music to keep going. Eventually, he moved to London, intending to focus more seriously on sound for film and games. He didn’t expect music to follow him. But after arriving, he met people who already knew his work. Some became friends, some became bandmates and before long, he was performing again. Then, in 2023, Indian listeners began discovering his music in large numbers, while his performances in the UK introduced his work to people from a much wider range of backgrounds.

Three years after moving to London, Misbah is building a life across music and film, continuing to make his own records while moving from open mics to festivals and showcases. During his time in London, Misbah has performed on different stages, including ANHAD Festival, Kismet Café and as a featured artist at Tassel Jam. This September, he is set to perform at Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg. His sound hasn’t changed dramatically. The difference is that more people are listening. “I was still making the same music. I just found a different audience for it.”

Instep spoke to Misbah about leaving Lahore, starting over in London and figuring out how to keep making the music he wants.

Instep: Before going solo, you were in various bands. What did being in a band teach you that you still carry with you?

Misbah: It taught me how to work with other musicians and build chemistry with them. It also made me have more faith in myself as a musician and songwriter. In a band, it can be hard to know who’s actually doing the work. Sometimes you’re doing a lot of it yourself and you don’t realise that until you’re working alone. I loved being in bands and learned a lot from them. But when you’re working on a solo project, you know exactly what needs to be done. You don’t have to manage a band on top of everything else.

Instep: Did going solo happen because you wanted to or because you eventually realised you had to?

Misbah: A bit of both. I had always thought of myself in terms of my role in a band. I was primarily the guitarist. That was my job: play tightly and occasionally compose. Going solo meant unlearning the idea that you needed a singer, drummer or bassist to make music. At first, I thought I’d have to find those people before I could make anything work. Eventually I realised I’m just someone who likes making things. I like making music, period. If someone asks what I play, I’ll say guitar, but I think of myself primarily as a singer-songwriter.

Instep: You eventually left Lahore for London. What did you lose when you left?

Misbah: Leaving Lahore was heartbreaking. I had my entire music community there, my studio, which was basically my full-time job and regular gigs. I remember thinking, ‘You’ve given music its fair shot. Now go and focus on the technical side’. I also work in sound for film and that’s where I wanted to grow professionally.

Instep: When you arrived in London, were you still trying to pursue music?

Misbah: Not really, not in the way I had before. But then I started meeting people who had already heard my music. They’d reach out, we’d meet, become friends and eventually bandmates. The band kept changing as people came and went because of other commitments. Every time we looked for new members, I seemed to find more fans. My old drummer, Nandita, is a close friend now and is still a very active part of the band, but doesn’t play anymore because it became difficult to juggle a corporate job with the band. She was surprised she hadn’t come across me sooner. That growing audience led to things like Dialled In, which selects three South Asian artists from across the UK. I was one of them.

Some of those early fans became close friends. I’d stay at their homes and they’d treat me like family, which is actually why my band here is called ‘Misbah and Family’, though at most gigs we just go with ‘Misbah’ to avoid confusion. People otherwise search for ‘Misbah & Family’ on music streaming sites including Spotify.

Instep: What was the part of starting over that nobody warned you about?

Misbah: When I arrived, the UK had just raised the salary threshold for skilled-worker visa sponsorship, which closed off a route I’d been counting on. My field doesn’t have many corporate employers able to offer that kind of starting salary. I seriously considered leaving. But the music opportunities that started opening up made me want to stay. I worked at McDonald’s for a year, then did odd jobs for another year before getting a real foothold in the film industry.

Instep: What does your life look like now?

Misbah: I work across music and film. I’m a producer, an audio engineer and I do sound design for film. It’s work that’s close enough to music to let me keep a studio and make music on my own time without needing a nine-to-five job. I also do location sound for film, which reliably pays the bills. I’ve worked on Joyland and Ms. Marvel. London is expensive and difficult to sustain yourself in, but it’s also beautiful and feels like home.

Instep: At one point you switched from English to Urdu because you thought it might make your music more popular. What happened?

Misbah: Early on, I wrote in English and assumed switching to Urdu would make me more popular. It didn’t. My music still wasn’t fitting what was popular at the time, which tends to be lighter, narrative pop. My songs lean more towards complicated relationships and existential themes. That just wasn’t what people were looking for at the time. For a while, I thought that meant it wasn’t going to work. My taste is quite obscure and I was putting everything into the music, including videos, but I couldn’t sustain myself from it. Then I moved to the UK. I had more or less given up, but people here had heard my music and wanted to form a band. I started making music again. Then, in 2023, Indian listeners discovered my music and it went viral there. Suddenly my audience had gone from being mostly Pakistani to mostly Indian. Sometimes you put your heart into something and it just takes longer to be found.

Instep: Your music is very different from the heavier music you made earlier. When did you realise this was the sound you wanted?

Misbah: It was a real departure from my earlier bands, Keeray Makoray and Takatak, which were heavy metal and involved a lot of screaming. The shift happened when I started my studio, Rescue the Frog Studio. To make a living, I was producing for different artists, so I started exploring synths more and listening closely to what I was hearing. Hearing Janoobi Khargosh’s music was a turning point. I remember thinking, this is the kind of music I actually want to make. Waleed Ahmed (from Janoobi Khargosh) and I became close friends and he pushed me to stop overthinking things and move away from complicated, rule-bound music. I started making what I actually felt like making. It turned out to be synths, analogue textures, detuned and slightly off sounds, things that felt ethereal and echoey.

Instep: Who else shaped that sound?

Misbah: Kevin Parker is a major influence and so is Nazia Hassan. Nazia was so ahead of her time. Melody’s Echo Chamber is another big inspiration, especially in terms of how I want my vocals to sound live. She uses reverb in a way that makes her voice feel like it’s coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. I think that’s the kind of music I’m drawn to: artists who took their time and either eventually found a larger audience or stayed under the radar but were still making something worth listening to.

Instep: What comes first when you sit down to write?

Misbah: The songwriter comes first. The idea has to exist before anything else. Then the musician part takes over: this chord works better, this voicing works better. After that comes the producer’s work, which is more technical. When I started writing music, I wasn’t thinking about topics. That’s mostly something I figure out afterwards, when I look back and decide what a song is about. When I sit down to write, I’m trying to discover music rather than just create it.

When I wrote ‘Darya’, I knew one line needed to exist and the whole song developed around it. I think of music as something that already exists in the ether in all its possible forms and I’m channelling it rather than inventing it. If I can tap into that, I trust it’ll make sense. I don’t need to force it.

Instep: Do you miss having other musicians around when you’re working?

Misbah: Definitely. There are songs that are too ambitious for where I am right now, especially things involving odd time signatures that I can’t quite make work as a solo producer.

There’s one called ‘Aadi Raat’ that I can’t get to shift naturally from a 6/4 feel into 4/4. That’s where I really miss having a full band to work through an idea with. Recording itself also becomes an audio-engineering job. You’re thinking about microphone placement and how to get an instrument to sound right. In my current setup, that sometimes literally means draping myself in a mattress…

Instep: You’ve talked about struggling to sustain yourself from music in Pakistan. What do you think is missing for independent musicians?

Misbah: Infrastructure. Independent artists don’t have enough ways to develop and sustain themselves.

Instep: What would better infrastructure actually look like?

Misbah: Artists don’t have many platforms, so if brands are the ones stepping up, that’s often the only way to get paid. I understand why people take those opportunities. I’ve always thought brands should invest directly in artists and their records. Pay them and let them make what they want, without algorithm-driven guidelines and let the music find its own audience. Eventually, it does.

Instep: Has Coke Studio’s role as a kind of gateway for Pakistani artists changed?

Misbah: For a long time, being on Coke Studio was almost a credential abroad. But there’s so much beyond Coke Studio. There was Nescafé Basement, Smog Sessions and countless independent shows. There is incredible music being made across all these spaces.

Instep: Melancholy runs through a lot of your music. Is that deliberate?

Misbah: I think all of my music can be associated with melancholia and I don’t really worry about that becoming “the brand”. I love sad songs. Sometimes I even challenge myself to write the saddest possible song, something that makes a listener cry. So, if people see my work that way, I’m glad. But it isn’t completely intentional either. It’s just where I land.

Instep: ‘Beh Gayi’ feels like a good example of that.

Misbah: ‘Beh Gayi’ is about the contradiction after a breakup: when you can resent someone one moment and almost idealise them the next, remembering the good times even though you’re still angry. I’d planned the verses to be hard and the chorus soft. What I didn’t plan was the outro. I wanted it to suddenly become fast and chaotic, which changed the emotional register. It stopped being only about the relationship and became about how chaotic life can feel underneath everything. There’s sound design throughout: planes, traffic, people talking, voice notes of my parents arguing, my niece counting. The guitar does strange things; there are screams and then it ends abruptly.

Instep: ‘Sitaray’ feels de-eply personal. What was happening when you wrote it?

Misbah: I wasn’t consciously writing it for my grandmother. After she died, I went through a bad period and didn’t know what I wanted. I only knew I wanted to leave, go to the mountains and look at the stars. I started by finding words rather than thinking about a concept. Once they came together, the song became a kind of relief. It made me realise how badly I needed to be alone, away from the house.

Instep: Your live versions can sound quite different from the recordings. Why?

Misbah: I don’t think a song has to be performed exactly as it was recorded. People aren’t coming to a show for karaoke. They want to see something happen live. I love playing with a band, so most of my songs have different live arrangements. ‘Sitaray’, for instance, sounds almost like a different song live. If the live version is exactly like the recording, you might as well listen to the recording.

Instep: What’s the song you still don’t know how to make?

Misbah: I want to bring funk-rock influences into dream pop, with odd time signatures and complicated drum patterns inside a dream-pop landscape. I want music people can chill to, but there’s something genuinely strange underneath it. I’m not sure it fully makes sense yet, but that’s the goal.

Instep: Does Reeperbahn feel like a marker of how far you’ve come?

Misbah: Definitely. I’ve gone from playing at open mics held in pubs to playing festivals and showcase events. I’ve played public festivals where people would stop, listen and start dancing. Then there’s Reeperbahn Festival, which is a completely different kind of opportunity. I’m representing the UK there this September and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes from it.

Instep: If you stopped making music tomorrow, what would you miss?

Misbah: I’d miss myself, honestly. I’ve been obsessed with music for as long as I can remember. I remember hearing Shakira’s ‘Whenever, Wherever’ as a kid and thinking it was the best thing in the world. The person I am is tied up in music. If I’m feeling low these days, it’s usually a sign that it’s been too long since I sat down and actually made something. If I stopped entirely, I don’t think I’d recognise myself.

“When I sit down to write, I’m trying to discover music rather than just create it. I think of music as something that already exists in the ether in all its possible forms and I’m channelling it rather than inventing it. If I can tap into that, I trust it’ll make sense. I don’t need to force it.” – Misbah