Raf Saperra’s music has struck a chord with millions, and among them is our guest curator Riz Ahmed, who has chosen to spotlight him as one of the most exciting emerging artists today. “Listening to “Jhaleya” from Raf’s “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not” album is like hearing nostalgia remix itself—he fuses bhangra drums with grime bounce, and every beat feels rooted and evergreen,” says Ahmed. Here Saperra tells Joe Zadeh how south London’s multiculturalism raised him, and why community is key to creativity.
“In your presence, even fairies fall short,” sings Raf Saperra in the opening line of his recent single, “Step Out”. It’s a disarmingly poetic string of words—romantic, mystical, almost courtly—like something you’d read in a book of ancient devotional verse. “Her cheeks blush like Kashmiri fruit in the sun,” he sings later, in lyrics made even more luminous by the fact they are sung in Punjabi, with the sliding, bending and sustaining notes so typical of the region’s traditional folk music, when voice becomes inseparable from instrument.
And yet these are the vocals of an ostensibly pop hit (over five million streams across YouTube and Spotify, and counting, in just over a month) that could not feel more ultramodern in its bouncy and intoxicating mix of dub, dancehall, and hip-hop; could not be more cutting edge in both its high-energy music video and the luxury bespoke garms worn by Saperra as he dances through each meticulously crafted scene. It’s this unlikely and non-linear blend of influences that has made Saperra one of the most compelling new artists in British music. “I’m just undeniably being me,” he says, when we chat over Zoom.
Born in Streatham, south London, in a Pakistani Muslim household, Saperra was raised in a rich cultural melting pot so typical of the UK capital. At school, he was spitting over novelty grime riddims with friends; at home, his mum was listening to Bollywood soundtracks and 90s bhangra, while his older brothers introduced him to Eminem, Black Sabbath, and Wu-Tang Clan.
“As I was finishing secondary school, I was really getting into UK bhangra and building my historical and theoretical knowledge. That’s when I convinced my family to let me get a dhol,” he says, referring to the double-headed drum used in traditional music across the Indian subcontinent. “You can imagine that finding a dhol class in south London was like finding a needle in a haystack. But I did, and started building a community. I remember in one class, I tried singing Boliyan [Punjabi couplets often sung in accompaniment of bhangra dances]—just kinda freestyling. All the men in my class, who were all significantly older than me, said: “Yo, you sound good.” And so began a few long years of me hunting for the tutelage of classical teachers and mentors in Indian classical music, absorbing all that knowledge and theory, but still finding my own accent, vocally, which you hear today.”
What’s strange is that until 2020, Saperra had never released a song. In fact, he says, from around 2015 to 2020, he fell out of love with music entirely, and instead focused on his career as a filmmaker through directing and editing music videos. “But when COVID happened, there were no more location shoots or studio budgets. You couldn’t go outside anymore,” he explains. “I don’t even know for what reason, but I just started putting videos of me singing on Instagram. I only had about 200 followers at the time. I was dropping weekly covers of Punjabi songs that I liked; of singers from the early 2000s and late 90s. They were built different, man; there was a certain style, power, and octave of folk singing in those songs. I think people saw me, a fly kid from South London who sounds so rural and village-y but dresses so street, and there was a weird taboo interest in it. Like, what is this?”
After six months of posting covers on social media, he decided to drop his first proper single, “G’Lassy Riddim” a thunderous Punjabi rap track. “I set myself some realistic goals: If I make it to 100,000 organic views on this, then I'll continue doing music,” he says. “That video went viral in the Punjabi community, and I hit those 100,000 views.”
In fact, he says he thinks none of his subsequent career would have been possible without the community that soon formed around his music. “It was the community that put on Raf Saperra. Despite being from London, it was really in the heart of Birmingham that my music started spreading, specifically the core Punjabi Sikh community,” he says. “Before I dropped “G’Lassy Riddim” I’d put out a devotional track to one of the Sikh martyrs, Baba Deep Singh. Where I’m from, you’ve got West Punjab in Pakistan and East Punjab in India. So that track was my way of showing love, respect and unity for both sides of this divided Punjab. People came for that, then once they heard the more commercial bhangra, they were like: Yo, this is fire too.”
Fast forward to now and the radically diverse musical diet of his youth is still echoing through every release. Saperra has had an underground hit on the club scene via the UK garage track “NLS (Nach Le Soniye)”; dropped a Punjabi folk-meets-East Coast rap EP (“5 Deadly Venomz”) on the Mass Appeal label of hip-hop legend Nas; and released a tender and soulful collection of seven songs called “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not”. “It's really important for me to showcase that I'm not a one-trick pony,” he says. “I might have built my following through hip-hop and Punjabi folk, but at the same time I'm a storyteller.”
He wants his music to trigger conversations around representation. “I've always wanted to go out and represent that teenage kid, me, that was struggling to land any work outside of being racially typecast or stereotyped just for being brown,” he says. “I’m a London boy, but it's a choice that the language I'm doing this in is Punjabi. That might make things ten times harder in some ways, but it also makes it ten times easier to stand out in a crowd. And once you're doing that, then it's all eyes on me.”
A defining part of Saperra’s identity as an artist is the marriage of audio and visuals. In fact, he tells me he doesn’t even pursue a song idea, if he can’t see it playing out in his mind like the scene from a film. “My visual ecstasy comes from seeing a massive Sergio Leone close-up, or the precision of an Akira Kurosawa shot.” He even used to run his own film club in South London. “I'd handpick the films with a loose syllabus in mind, whether that was one director’s career or a particular movement; like the Sun Tribe films of Japan, French New Wave, or the new Hollywood movement from 1968 onwards.”
He applies that visual literacy to his music videos, many of which he either writes and directs himself, or has a big hand in doing so. In “Step Out”, Seperra enters a daydream world, and pursues a love interest through the pages of a glossy magazine. Whereas in “Modern Mirza”, one of his biggest tracks to date, he takes the prototypical rap video aesthetic and reimagines it on the streets of Lahore, Pakistan.
“I've always been behind the editing process of my videos, whether I’m directing or performing, because I see it in a certain way. I know that when I’ve said a certain line, I want it to be cutting with emotion,” he says. This attention to detail continues all the way into the minutiae of post-production. “I see color grading as the final mix master for a music video—I know exactly how it’s got to look. You could have the best video, bro, but if the color grade is shit then it doesn't hit.”
It’s fitting that “Modern Mirza” was inspired by an ancient Punjabi tale of doomed romance, first recorded by the 17th-century poet Pilu, another example of the timeless poetic stylings that lurk behind the slick and addictive grooves of every Raf Separra song. “Poetry is everything, man. Punjab is known as ‘The Land of Five Rivers’, so it was a middle ground for a lot of stuff; a melting pot for so many poets, from Waris Shah to Baba Bulleh Shah to all the brilliant songwriting still takes place there,” he says. “Punjabis are deep feelers.”
