On the Rise
Quiet Light

She’d grown up playing classical piano, and she hadn’t even necessarily intended on becoming a musician, but she felt, at the time, that if she were to pursue music, that was the only viable option. The world of indie gigging and self-made projects hadn’t opened to her just yet. It wasn’t music she grew up on, nor was it a scene she’d found herself in at that point in her life. And so instead, she set off to become a doctor. But in giving up one dream, she opened herself up to another, totally unexpected one, which came to her in the form of Quiet Light.

“I really viewed my potential in music to be very classical for most of my life,” Mahesh says. “When I didn’t get in, I just thought, ‘Okay, I’m not cut out for music in the capacity that I thought that I was.’”

When we speak, Mahesh is calling in from her home in Texas. She moved back after taking leave from medical school to focus on making and releasing her latest record, Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2, full time. Her first release with True Panther Records — the label behind Oklou, Grace Ives, Model/Actriz, and Frost Children — the album has quickly become one of the year’s critical darlings and made Mahesh herself one of the buzziest indie up-and-comers. 

Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 is one of those records that feels like a turning point — both for an artist and a scene. It positions itself in electronica, ambient, and even occasionally hyperpop-leaning production while managing to find an extremely grounding emotional core in lyrics that feel like pages from a long-lost Richard Linklater screenplay and an addictive edge the hookiness of a Swedish pop song. Along with her True Panther labelmates and others like Chanel Beads, she’s pushing forward the style of yearning, intelligent indietronica that’s slowly coalescing in the scene. It’s perhaps the modern version of the Imogen Heap sound, updated for a generation that puts glitch rappers and Elliott Smith on the same playlist.

“I wanted to make an ambient record where you could show it to your random co-worker who doesn’t know anything about ambient music and they love the songs,” Mahesh says of her sonic mission for the album. “I wanted to make something that was experimental but still traditionally pretty.”

Yet as she takes me through how Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 came to be and the story of her life in music so far, I can’t help but realize how much this has all taken her by surprise. Several times, she describes feeling growing up like becoming a performing solo musician was too “far-fetched,” just not the kind of thing people did. She went straight from high school to an undergraduate degree The University of Texas at Austin to medical school, which she’s now almost completed. 

When the True Panther offer came through, Mahesh knew it was too good to pass up. “I knew that medicine would always be there, no matter what happens. You can always go back to school. […] And, my education will always be very important to me. It’s just that, I knew that if I didn’t take this time right now to focus on the album, then I would regret it,” Mahesh said. So that’s exactly what she did. 

Mahesh is no stranger to a busy schedule. While working in a hospital and studying for her medical board exams — which, mind you, she’s now completed — she also managed to release five albums — including the first Blue Angel Sparkling Silver — along with scores of other singles and EPs.  “What would happen is the previous album would enter the mixing stage, and then I would start the next one,” she explains. “It was definitely, like, compulsive music making.” Sure, it was, as she describes it, a bit of a Hannah Montana double life, but she also wouldn’t trade it. In fact, she feels it made her better. What she calls the “militaristic” discipline of medical care turned into a hyper-diligent approach to perfecting her craft. “No matter what, you need to get up every day at a very early hour and go to the hospital and help people,” she says on her med school mindset. “That mentality really carried over into music, because there were periods where I was going to give up on this whole thing, like no one was listening, it’s a lot of work, I was spending a lot of money getting it mastered. But, I don’t know, I became militaristic about music as well in a crazy way.” 

Over the last five years, she’d fit music making into any spare moment she had. But working on Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2, she forced herself to halt the endless grind and lean into finding space as a service to the work instead. She moved back to Austin, in her home state, to facilitate that change. She spent days eating in frequenting mom-and-pop restaurants and swimming at local spots. She ended up spending much of the last two years working solely on the record, the longest she’s ever sat with a project. Finding that space to breathe — and to be home in the comfort of routine, familiar spaces, and loved ones — has been one of Mahesh’s greatest blessings over the last year. As her career takes off and she starts getting pulled in a million directions once again — between being on the road to being on writing and studio trips, she’s now only spending two weeks of every month in Austin  —  she’s become acutely aware of just how special that time was. 

Still, if there’s any word to describe Mahesh, it’s certainly prolific. Back in her undergrad days at UT, she found herself running in its DIY music scenes. This was her first foray back into music-making after putting her classical dreams to rest. “Everyone that I knew there made music,” she says. By working on songs with friends, she started picking up small bits about production. Eventually, she got her own license for Logic Pro and started producing her own songs as well. Through the pandemic, her output increased to two or three songs a day. A lot of it, she says, was “garbage.” But sifting through those wonky early tracks let her cut her teeth and find the confidence to produce to the level she’s at today. She put in her ten thousand hours and then some.

“I always thought when I was making music in Austin and saw my guy friends producing their own stuff that if they could do it, I could do it,” Mahesh says slyly. All of Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 was self-produced, a point she takes particular pride in. There’s a special sort of pleasure, she tells me, in correcting someone who assumes she had nothing to do with the production of her record. Women, as she rightly points out, are astoundingly underrepresented in producing circles, particularly in the ambient-electronic scene she calls home. 

The level technical prowess on the record is such that you know it was made by someone who has a true reverence for and mastery over their craft. Mahesh certainly does, and in developing that competency, she ended up returning to that inner classical music student she thought she’d left behind. 

“It’s funny, I still kind of view my alternative music through a very classic lens. Like, I do think that, especially with this record, even though it’s very symphony-like in a lot of ways,” she admits.  

But the most crucial part of already knowing all the “musical rules,” she says, has been that she knows when exactly she can break them. With Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2, she wanted both the process and the product to feel uninhibited. More than that, she wanted to put any sense of ego aside and to make best production decisions that would be most in service of the songs.

The “Postinternetfame,” for example, is an assemblage of four tight verses, an unconventionally short song structure that has ended up perhaps one of the most memorable earworms on the record. It’s a song about wanting more that you’re ever going to get, and that’s exactly what the structure gives you. It ends leaving you holding the baggage in your hands. On “You Say I Love You,” the song pauses and glitches and breaks, mirroring broken communication. “Berlin” overlays Mahesh’s delicate wails with real voice notes, building an atmospheric soundscape that blends dreams and reality. Across the record, Mahesh gave herself the freedom to break from convention in these small ways, working to make the songs feel lived in, charmingly messy, and real. 

“That’s a big part of the Blue Angel ethos, from record one to record two, is this idea of anything goes,” she explains. And it’s that sense of freedom that makes Quiet Light as an artistic project so enthralling, too.