New Delhi: On 18 March, Sony Music India’s Instagram account posted a throwback to singer Alisha Chinai’s 1995 classic pop song Made In India. Another reel, posted on the same day, featured four young women performing a catchy but unfamiliar tune. ‘One-of-a-kind girl band’ – flashed the text on the clip. The girl group was called W.i.S.H and their pop song Lazeez had dropped on 1 March. Chinai’s hit anthem and W.i.S.H.’s debut song are separated by almost three decades. The two reels roughly sandwich India’s pop music timeline, which peaked in the late 1990s before fading into oblivion.
Now, the four-member group—sisters Ri (Riya Duggal) and Sim (Simram Duggal), Zo (Zoe Siddharth), and Suchi (Suchita Shirke)—is aiming to bring it back from the dead. Their rise comes at a time when singers and bands—Prateek Kuhad, Ritiviz, Jasleen Royal, The F16s, Peter Cat Recording Co—are stepping out of the shadows of Bollywood and making it big.
But the women in their mid-20s have very specific shoes to fill, they’re the heirs to Viva’s legacy. It was India’s first girl band formed in 2002 through a reality TV show on Channel V called Coke V Popstar. But W.i.S.H. was not engineered on TV, an ambitious music producer, Mikey McCleary, handpicked them to lead a new music revolution. It helped that they were all based in Mumbai and post their music on Instagram.
Social media brought the women to the limelight. Ri and Sim had been sharing their music under the name ‘Simetri’ since 2016. Zo followed them for four years and eventually reached out to collaborate in 2020. Suchi started posting videos of her singing once the pandemic hit. McCleary’s team first reached out to Ri in 2021. It took three years for W.i.S.H. to release its first single.
“It almost seemed like they (fans) were waiting for something like this. And the minute it hit, they were like, we need to support this because this is what we’ve been wanting. So that kind of came as a shock,” Zo says.
It’s a vastly different era from when Viva disbanded in 2003. The band, a joint venture of Sony Music India and McCleary, enters the market at a time when language is no longer a barrier to success and social media can catapult anyone to the limelight. In a world where K-pop has reinvented pop music culture, leading to the resurgence of boy and girl groups, W.i.S.H. isn’t just looking for recognition within India. It has its eyes set on ushering in a new age of I-pop worldwide.
Also read: Viva – India’s first girl group that sang feminist anthems in the early 2000s
A shot at history
From when the idea of a girl band came to him, McCleary, a New Zealander based in Mumbai, was determined to handpick the members and not choose them through a televised talent hunt show. His record label, Bay Music House, stealthily searched for potential members on social media. His reason was that for a pop band “to have longevity” and that “special combination of people” it was better to go for a deliberate and organic developmental process.
McCleary’s vision took three years to come to fruition. Things didn’t come easy in a country devoid of an independent pop music scene.
Ri was “a little worried” when McCleary’s team approached her. “This culture of having girl groups/boy bands didn’t exist (in India). Even when I was growing up, I never really had an Indian pop star that I could look to for inspiration. So I always thought, maybe the only way that I could follow my dream was if I moved abroad,” she says.
This was despite being active in the music scene for five years with her sister Sim.“I wondered whether this [the band] could happen. Because it means all the factors had to be right,” she says.
The success of Lazeez—a sexy dance number infused with Latino and Indian musical elements—is proof everything had aligned just right. The song’s music video has garnered over 6 million views since its launch. And a month in, the group already has a name for its fandom—W.i.S.H. Stars—which was picked through an Instagram poll.
But it didn’t even take a day for fan pages dedicated to them to pop up on social media. The band members were also taken aback, they reached out to the record label to verify if they were “legit fans”.
“[It started when] Mikey had this idea, [which was] more like a question—why isn’t there a girl group in India? Why hasn’t there been one for so many years?” says Zo, stressing that “now is the time” to launch a group when “music from different countries is going global everywhere”.
McClearly wasn’t the only one asking these questions. Ri noticed their videos are flooded with comments saying, “Oh my God! Finally an Indian girl group! We must support them.”
The quartet released their second single, Galti, on 5 April. While the song has less than 5,000 views, all the reactions have been positive. “Their songs gives me a fresh pop vibe. Not really too much electronic sound only harmonical voices,” wrote one commentor. The music video for the retro-futuristic, funky, disco dance song will be released on 12 April.
They are aware that they stand at the cusp of making history. And their record label is paying special attention to their social media image—from doing weekly Instagram Lives called ‘Wish Wednesday’ to maintaining carefully crafted Instagram pages, one for the band and one for each member. But they’re interacting with their fans beyond the screen too, with radio shows and live performances. The women have embraced their pop star persona with confidence, unfazed by the weight of being India’s first group in over 20 years.
“I don’t think the crown is too heavy because the space has been empty. I feel like we’re more excited and kind of driven to take up that role,” Zo says.
Also read: Tripura’s first girl band is breaking barriers—A broken guitar to India’s Got Talent
Resurgence of Indian pop music
McClearly is determined to usher in the era of I-Pop but he is certain the route he took delivers “something stronger” than current international pop music. It creates a band that’s “not manufactured”, is consistent and comes up with “really good music” as the members are involved in every stage of the creative process.
This stands in stark contrast to the prevalent K-pop industry model, characterised by global auditions and rigorous talent scouting. While McCleary said the K-pop model can’t be transported into an Indian context, he acknowledged it was possible to draw from the artist development aspect of the industry.
“Even if you have artists who are already talented, there’s still a lot of development and I think we’ve done the right amount of that before we’ve come out with W.i.S.H,” says McCleary, who has worked on several advertising campaigns in India, including Vodafone, Coca-Cola, Cadbury and has worked with Lucky Ali and AR Rahman.
The most crucial element that prompted him to dive into the project was the momentum within the pop music landscape in India. He observed that the spectrum of artists had expanded. They no longer need to be in the shadows of Bollywood and audiences are maturing to understand that artists are independent entities in themselves and “not just playback singers”.
“I think there’s a definite resurgence, in the last five years, of independent music in India. It’s going to be hard to compare it back to the late 1990s when there was a lot of investment. (But) I think it’s growing in a very organic way in India,” says McCleary.
According to the producer, a new pop music group was not something that only India needed but something that the rest of the world would “really be very interested in and want to absorb”. He is optimistic that the future of Indian pop music is bright because the country has “a global presence”.
In his eyes, the four women, whom he meticulously molded to be the Gen-Z pop stars of India, are already trailblazers.
“I honestly think that in the next six months, we’ll see other Indian girl and boy groups coming out. I think this will be seen as the start of a new era,” he says.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)