“You can say Laili is
pagal [mad] but he’s that type of person,” says musician and producer Usman WithD from his studio in Quetta. “Laili is a malang [dervish], he’s in love.”
Usman, the founder of the Quetta-based multi-artist music outfit Banur’s Band, is talking about his platform’s latest release, Laili . A song that comes as a breath of fresh air in a scene currently dominated by repetitive angsty rap and retro-pop and rock music. Laili is an upbeat, folk-pop song that puts on a full display of a variety of traditional Baloch instruments and marries the Baloch music and lyrics with a section in Urdu, presumably to make the song a little more palatable to mainstream audiences. Even if they hadn’t, Laili would’ve worked its catchy magic on audiences anyway.