Nagaland: Music Recommendations

Check out my Nagaland book recommendations too, where I also have a tiny film section. If you're traveling in Nagaland, you can read my posts on Dimapur and on Kohima, Khonoma, Kigwema, and the Hornbill Festival.

Nagaland has a surprisingly good music scene for a small remote state. There’s a bit of everything here. I found less traditionally inspired music than I had hoped for, but there was a range of good western inspired music. My unexpected favorite was Trance Effect, a very fun indie-pop group, and I also really liked the Tetseo Sisters doing a modern take on Naga folk music and a folk rock band called Abiogenesis.

I’ll start with the most traditional sounding music and then branch out.

I didn’t find a lot of recordings of traditional music from Nagaland. There’s a great looking collection called Naga: Songs From The Mist which has 34 songs which were “recorded on location in India (Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh) and Myanmar (Sagaing State) between 1998 and 2002.” Unfortunately it isn’t available online, though I emailed the guy who put it together and he told me that he hopes to get it online in the future. In the meantime, the CD is available to order, I believe. 

On a similar note is the Selection of field recordings from Nagaland, Assam, India, recorded by John Henry Hutton 1914-19, from the Pitt Rivers Museum. Not exactly riveting stuff and as you’d expect the sound quality is poor, but these are good to hear nonetheless. 

I found a bit more clicking around on Youtube and watching videos from festivals, but there’s not a ton of range here. Once in a village we heard a young girl and her father sing a beautiful song while playing a local string instrument but I couldn’t find any recordings of stuff like that. 

There are some artists modernising Naga music. I don’t love any of it but there’s good and promising work here. The most prominent artists making Naga music are the Tetseo Sisters. Their first album Li, Chapter One : The Beginning is more traditional, very stripped down, minimal, mostly accapella folk songs that have a unique, pretty sound with a hint of some soulful church choir harmonizing. My favorite song is O Rhosi. Their second album A Slice Of Li : 2019 takes the folk songs and gives them dancey electronic pop production. It’s fun, though I definitely prefer the former and personally would have liked the modern version to go in a different direction, like some folksy indie pop sort of thing. But if I’m feeling cheerful and not like a grumpy old guy I can get down to these tunes.

There are some attempts at modernising Naga music while keeping a local feel. I didn’t fall in love with any of it but I appreciate what they’re doing. SeYie Intrepid is one example. I found some other random songs while browsing Youtube.

Still in a Naga language and with local elements but branching more into western music, I like the folk-countryish song Aren atsü lepong by Elate Fusion. If we can include Nagas from Manipur, there’s the more rock oriented Featherheads Haokui who I think are pretty good. 

Moving into English-language music, we get to Abiogenesis, whose music I generally really dug. They have some Naga touches in the singing and instrumentation here and there (and they showcase a bamboo flute that they invented), but it mostly feels like western folk rock. I wasn’t able to find all of their albums, and there are other bands of the same name whose albums are sometimes under the same listing on Youtube and Spotify so it’s confusing. But anyway, skip the first two albums (Midnight Whispers, Christmas! Christmas!) and jump straight to their much better third album Aeon Spell (Spotify / Youtube) followed by Rustic Relish (Spotify / Youtube), Slice of Heaven (Spotify / Youtube) and Tales of Harmony (Spotify / Youtube), all recommended despite their terrible covers. It’s all pretty good and sonically fairly similar, I’m not sure I have a favorite. There are a few other albums that I can’t find, but four albums should be enough for you for now.

Moving into fully western music territory, my favorite artist from Nagaland is the indie-pop group  Trance Effect who has a knack for making super catchy tunes. They have two EPs, Clowns (2020, Spotify / Bandcamp) and Are We There Yet? (2024, Spotify / Youtube), plus the live album Fusefest Live: Originals (Spotify / Youtube) which has some new songs, not as noteworthy but still good. I legitimately love around half of their songs. Took Me A While, By Your Side, More Love, Blue Sweatshirt, 7 Hours, all killer stuff, totally brings out the teenage girl in me, highly recommended. Clowns and Overrated are both really fun. I look forward to more from them. My wife loves them as much as I do, and usually she can’t be bothered with the stuff I listen to. Plus, gotta love the curly haired singer, she’s badass.

There’s some nice chill singer/songwriter stuff. I enjoyed the music of Temsu Clover, who has the soft and pretty album Hello Love (Spotify / Youtube). I also really like what I’ve heard from Alemyim, who has a Taylor Swift-esque pop sound and should soon have an EP out. 

Radically different is the glam rock group Fifth Note who have one album, Here We Are (Spotify / Youtube). I didn’t think I liked this kind of music but after a handful of listens I ended up kinda loving it. It reminded me of the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City soundtrack. I’d be curious to see some opinions from glam rock enthusiasts. 

I heard plenty of other competent versions of western music (or K-poppy stuff, and if you want more here’s an excessively long playlist) and some of it was pretty good but nothing really stood out. I wanted something that connected me to the landscape of Nagaland, but I ran out of Naga music to listen to, so I spent several weeks of my Nagaland trip listening to American country music. This worked quite well.

There are a number of documentaries on music in Nagaland. A.R. Rahman produced one called From Headhunting to Beatboxing (as of writing this it’s not available to watch). Songs of the Blue Hills (trailer, full movie) is about folk music, as is Up Down and Sideways (trailer, director interview), specifically about “work songs.” They look good.