After Winning The Hearts Of Bollywood, Dhee Sets Her Sights On Australia's Indie Scene

Dhee is one of Australian music’s most successful exports, with her songs regularly scratching up tens of millions of streams from all around the world (on Spotify alone, she has an average of 5.7 million monthly listeners) – so why isn’t she a household name?

Well in India, she certainly is. Launching her career in the early 2010s, Dhee rose to fame as a playback singer, lending her buoyant and charismatic tenor to soundtracks for dozens of Bollywood heavy-hitters. Her star power quickly grew to rival some of the leads in the films she sung for, and tracks from them have gone on to become enormous singles in their own right; take the record-breaking Rowdy Baby (from 2018’s Maari 2) for example – not only has it been streamed on Spotify more that 61 million times, it currently sits on YouTube with some 1.5 billion views.

Duly established as a bonafide screen queen, Dhee is now stepping out into a new kind of spotlight: the local indie-pop scene. Her first single as an independent artist was Can’t You Stay A Little Longer, landing back in May as a poignant ode to her spiritual homeland of Western Sydney (though she was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, she was raised in the humble suburbs of Quakers Hill). Earlier this week, she followed it up with another bewitching tribute to her heritage, I Wear My Roots Like A Medal.

Speaking to The Music, Dhee’s manager explained that her new track is about “celebrating her roots while navigating Australia and India”, with its accompanying music video – shot on location in Sri Lanka – “showcasing her pride in her culture but also shedding light on the generational trauma experienced by many Sri Lankans who've come out of a multi decade civil war”. Dhee launched the song yesterday (August 8) with a performance at NSW Parliament House, hosted by MP Julia Finn with several other political heavyweights in attendance.

In a Zoom chat we had shortly before she made the trek Down Under, Dhee told us this new era was a long time coming; she started working on these songs around four years ago, but had to put them on ice while she navigated peaks and valleys in her film career, as well as an ill-fitting partnership with a record label. “I’ve been waiting so long to just release something,” she says candidly. “It starts physically weighing you down when you're not able to share the art you've been holding onto for a very long time. I’m just happy to be getting it all out into the world!”

Both of the songs Dhee’s released thus far will appear on her forthcoming debut album, Jackfruit, which is slated for release next February (although she notes a proper date isn’t set in stone just yet). She describes the record at large as “a jumble of many different sounds”, reflecting her identity away from the spotlight; “There’s a lot of different things that influence me,” she continues, “and I listen to a lot of different music, so I think the album will be quite varied. It’s like a bag of jelly beans, you know? There’s all these different flavours in there.”

Even in the first two singles, Dhee covers a wealth of musical ground. Can’t You Stay A Little Longer is jazzy and groovy and silky smooth, while I Wear My Roots Like A Medal is more colourful and saturated, exploring elements of worldbeat and (fittingly) roots. It speaks to how the artist’s tastes have grown as the album came to life. “I've been writing these songs since I was 19,” she says, “and I think you san see that evolution throughout the album; even the way I write is constantly changing.”

Touching on her mission statement as an artist, Dhee says proudly that she “just want[s] to be honest with whatever I do, and say how I feel in a very honest way”. She continues: I think with this whole album, I just felt very liberated as a songwriter. Obviously I’ve been working on it for a long time, so I've been through many different experiences and I’ve felt so many different emotion – but every single time a song was finished, I just felt liberated.”