Quiet Light’s Riya Mahesh has been watching a lot of Eileen Gu TikToks lately.
Obviously, perfecting a halfpipe run is worlds apart from making music, but Mahesh thinks she can learn a lot from Gu about discipline. The Austin, Texas-based musician has been balancing her music practice with a full medical school schedule since 2020, and is inspired by the Olympic skier’s commitment to self-improvement. “[Pro athletes] push themselves so hard,” she says. “I kind of hope to do that.”
Mahesh’s hard work is still paying dividends as she enters a fertile period in her life. Wrapping up school, she’s releasing her debut mixtape, Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2, on the buzzy indie label True Panther on April 24, and is scheduling more live shows and a move to Los Angeles. She wrote the records’ songs after working shifts in the hospital.
“[Working a normal job] comes with a lot of time to dissociate and dream,” Mahesh says. “My music has emerged from a state of sort of dreaming. In the hospital, sometimes that is necessary. There’s a lot of healing, as well as death. Sometimes you have to believe everything will be okay and that there’s, you know, heaven.”
Dreamy is a fitting descriptor for Quiet Light’s pop music which is spacious and lyrical. The songs of Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2, a sequel to a 2023 mixtape, utilize ambient textures and unwieldy song structures to turn fleeting feelings into entire atmospheres. Take the standout “Berlin,” which begins slowly before veering into a drum-driven call into the void. Other songs on the project simply flow through various states of being: confessional verses, expressive oohs and ahhs, voice memos, and cloudy moments of synth envelopment.
“My music has emerged from a state of sort of dreaming. In the hospital, sometimes that is necessary.”
Her music’s inhibition and sense of play are what first caught the ear of True Panther’s founder Dean Bein, who compares her music to that of another artist he worked with at the beginning of their career, King Krule. “[Quiet Light and King Krule] both see the act of music making and that of being a musician as sacred, and separate from commercial ambitions,” he says. “It’s pure and honest.”
Nowadays, the pressures of TikTok and online virality color the beginnings of careers with a sense of urgency, but Mahesh sees music in the context of living a full and long life. “The idea that musicians [have to give] everything to music is kind of an illusion,” she says. She looks up to her labelmate Oklou as an example of an artist brilliantly balancing new motherhood with a career and creative peak.
“I feel so intensely about music that if I let it drive my entire life, I would really alienate a lot of my friends and family, and the structures in my life that keep me going,” she adds. “I’m trying to avoid, like, self-destruction.”
“I’m trying to avoid, like, self-destruction.”
Mahesh grew up playing classical piano in Dallas and like many who learned an instrument young, she initially felt burdened by the classes her mother enrolled her in. That later changed when she realized that piano could be a “vessel” for everything she’d been feeling. As she got older, she found new meaning and connection in classical music. She found joy in developing her skills as a vocalist, training in opera for 10 years. But she still made time to listen to Disney Channel stars and country music. “Throughout my whole life, [music has] been the thing that gets me through the day,” she says.
Beginning in 2023, a prolific string of releases — I Love You Because You’re In Love With The World, Fourth of July — brought about press intrigue and label interest. She responded to inquiries in between classes but it took a while for her to wrap her mind around the looming possibility of an actual career in music. “I’ve never really believed that music could be anything for me more than something that I do in my room,” she says. It wasn’t until True Panther reached out with their signing offer, and she felt buoyed by the experience of playing more shows, that she decided to “take a gamble” on herself by making and releasing an album with the label.
She knew she wanted to make a sequel to 2023’s Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 1 because that record was “the truest version of myself,” she adds. “This whole concept of free-form ambient music that isn’t really ambient [but] has a lot of pop elements.”
I ask her how she feels now that her music has officially transformed from a private exploration into a wider career. “[Thinking] my music is so personal and so pure that I can’t share it with other people [is a] pessimistic take,” she says. “At the end of the day we all go through breakups, we all move, we all go through traumatic life events, [we all experience] happiness as well as love.”
She plans to release another record and then continue pursuing other interests for a period. She’ll still make music, as always, but the career machinations may pause. Music isn’t an all–or-nothing endeavor for her, but a part of life regardless of the show bookings or contracts.
“People like Lorde who are huge massive mega-stars take like four years where no one hears anything from them,” she says. “It’s important for me to be able to keep music as sacred as it possibly can be.
