Today we’d like to introduce you to Suroor Hassan.
Hi Suroor, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for sharing your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers.
Hi! My name is Suroor, and I’m a pop star from Pakistan! Born and raised in Karachi, I immigrated to the United States when I was 18, initially moving to Iowa for college. After graduating, I lived in Chicago and Iowa City before moving to Memphis in 2022 for graduate school.
I’ve been writing songs and making music since childhood, but it was only when I moved to Memphis that I officially got my music career going. Growing up in Karachi, I didn’t have much internet access like many of my peers, but my mom made sure I was always surrounded by a ton of music, and I owe her a lot of my early interest in music. She had an extensive cassette tape collection that spanned both Western and Eastern artists, and one of my favorite childhood activities was listening to music with her in the car on the way to school, singing along together with the windows down. One of my earliest memories was when I was 4 or 5 years old, and she showed me a Britney Spears cassette that she had. I immediately felt captivated by the energy of the music and the cutesy aesthetics of the album art—it was the very first time in my life that I remember experiencing the emotion of joy and wanting to emulate something artistically. I remember at some point teasing her, jokingly saying, “Don’t you want me to be a pop star too? What if you bought me a guitar?” knowing we probably wouldn’t be able to afford one anyway. She left me shocked months later when she somehow found a way to snag me my first guitar, and ever since then, I have been obsessed with making music, writing constantly, and scribbling songs into my little notebook. As I grew into my teenage years, though, my interest in music-making waned slightly, and I think it’s because I never really saw myself as a traditional singer/songwriter. With just a guitar and my voice, I felt limited and creatively unfulfilled.
That completely changed once I discovered the world of electronic music. A couple of years after I moved to the States, I began to learn about electronic music production through computer-based software like Ableton, and it opened me up to limitless creative possibilities. I finally had the resources to make the kind of music I truly wanted to be making: music that blends genres and pushes boundaries, music that rethinks and rewrites the possibilities of art. After teaching myself some music production through the internet and experimenting with different styles and techniques for a while, I landed a job as an audio engineer for a small studio in Iowa, where I could shadow some producers and fine-tune my craft a bit. I felt like I was getting somewhere, but the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 abruptly stopped my growth. Following that interruption, I took what I learned and began independently working on some material that would become the foundation for my debut album. After moving to Memphis in 2022, I started connecting with some local music artists. I immediately developed an affinity for the scene: artists in Memphis had a musical vision similar to mine and were passionate about experimental innovation in the same ways I was. After networking with some artists and showing my music to bookers in the scene, I eventually got platformed on bills at Memphis shows. I slowly began to build a following through my performances. I played my first show in March of 2023, eventually releasing my debut album, LAVENDER SHOWERS, later that year in June.
Beyond music, I am also a published poet, and you can find my work in literary magazines such as Borderlands and Phi Magazine, as well as my self-published poetry zine “Peeling the Petals,” which is available for purchase through my website. I’m also an academic scholar and adjunct professor at the University of Memphis, pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy with a concentration in Gender Studies. I have an article published in the journal “Philosophy World Democracy,” with a couple of book chapters to be published in forthcoming anthologies. I am writing a dissertation on colonial constructions of s*x in South Asia and their strategies of governmentality. In 2023, I helped start a DIY music label called Purgatory Pressings. It organizes music shows in Memphis, releases an annual compilation album of artists, and helps provide resources to DIY artists such as studio space and helping them make CDs and cassette tapes of their music. In 2024, we are planning our first-ever music festival, which we plan to make an annual event showcasing artists from various subsets of the Memphis music scene.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what challenges have you had to overcome?
That’s an interesting question! I will say yes and no: The road leading up to being a professional musician was hard, but ever since I got my start, the road has been much smoother than I imagined. Most of the struggle came from building the confidence and stability to put myself out there as a professional artist. It’s taken a lot of work throughout my life to stay alive and functional, let alone make good music. As someone who immigrated to this country all by herself as a young adult with few resources, it’s taken a long time to get settled into a new country and culture, and it was only till I moved to Memphis in 2022 that I felt like I genuinely had stability for the first time in my life. And it’s no coincidence that the most stable period in my life has coincided with my capacity to pursue music professionally for the first time. It’s taken a lot of energy and effort to fine-tune my craft over decades, and my debut album has been years in the making—there are songs on LAVENDER SHOWERS that I started working on in 2020, over 3 years before they were finally released.
Making/releasing my music is only one side of the coin: confidently performing it live took much growth in a completely different capacity. I remember that after I gave my first-ever performance, I thought I had bombed: the energy of the stage completely overwhelmed me on my first go. I remember as soon as I got on the stage thinking, “Why are the spotlights so bright? And they’re shining right into my eyes; I can’t even see anything!” and what a terrible feeling: to know that everyone can see you as clearly as possible when you cannot see them at all. I felt awful walking off the stage, thinking I was way over my head and didn’t have what it took to be a performer. As I walked off, I was met with kind words of congratulations from my friends telling me how great my set was, and in my head, I was thinking, “Yeah, I get it; y’all are my friends, so you’re just trying to be supportive,” but what struck me was when I received the same reception from strangers who I had never met before, many of whom were successful musicians in their own right, asking me if I wanted to collaborate on music with them or perform with them at their shows. “I can’t believe that was your first show,” one of them said, “you were so comfortable on stage; it seemed like you’ve been performing for years!” I still remember just how shocked I was to hear that—I was not comfortable at all, and in my head, it felt like a botched performance, but somehow, the audience perceived it as the opposite. I began to realize the potential I had: that my art was already connecting with people at the beginning of my career when I had so much room for growth. I could only imagine how impactful my performances could be when I entirely became my own. And throughout consistently performing throughout the past year, I slowly felt that happening: the stage now truly feels like a home for me. The spotlight that once overwhelmed me now feels like a drug—I’m constantly craving its euphoria and only fully feel like myself when I’m in the spotlight.
That’s partly why my road since starting has felt a lot smoother than I thought it’d be: since making music for less than a year, it feels like my art has had an immediate connection with people, and opportunities have been falling my way a lot quicker than I thought they would. It was only a couple of months after I released my first album that I had the opportunity to book my first tour to promote it, and it was only a couple of months later that I had the chance to work with organizations and labels for financial and logistical support to become a consistently touring artist. The reception that my music and performances have already had was genuinely unexpected for me, and the road so far has been filled with many little surprises, like selling out of all of my merch on just my second stop on my first-ever tour! The first 24 years of my life were a mountain that I had to climb to where I am now, but since last year, I finally feel like I can drive on a highway. I’m grateful for my path, but at the same time, I know my journey has just begun, and I have many ambitious goals for the future. I plan to build on my current momentum.
Let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
The first thing that fans would usually say I’m known for is that my music contains a unique blend of genres and styles that come together to make art unlike anyone has ever seen before. As a genre marker, I usually label myself as “industrial hyperpop,” which gets at the general essence of my music. Hyperpop is a form of pop music that takes a more experimental, synth-based, autotune-heavy approach to pop music and forms the foundation of how I approach music-making. However, I also tend to blend darker and heavier sounds into the mix, which is why I like to use the modifier ‘industrial’ to indicate the harsher elements of my sound. But beyond that marker, there are lots of other influences that shine through in my music as well, drawing inspiration from Eastern genres like bhangra and qawwali, as well as more Western genres like alt-R&B, digital hardcore, drill/rage style trap, shoegaze, and others. Essentially, it’s pop music with a twist: incorporating a mix of various other genres to weave together unique soundscapes as a background for catchy, hard-hitting vocal melodies. I want to push the boundaries of pop music through my work and re-imagine what one considers pop or mainstream.
Another aspect of my art I’m mainly known for is the immersive nature of my live performances. The suroor show is a one-of-a-kind experience in music, where I always strive to leave the audience with an unforgettable night through a rollercoaster of emotions. To give you a skim of the sort of experiences that one goes through at my shows, I always start with my song ‘Pearl Drop,’ an ethereal bedroom-pop/shoegaze ballad that sets a dreamy tone to start the night. It’s the perfect music to slow-dance to, and I’ll sometimes encourage people in the crowd to slow-dance with someone they love while the song plays. But the energy quickly shifts as I then transition to my song ‘Disco Deewani Shit,’ which is a hard-hitting industrial hyper-pop banger that samples parts of the prior song and chops it up as part of the beat to make the transition both smooth and jarring in equal measure. This shift gets people grooving at a higher energy, and I’ll often get into the audience and dance with the crowd for this song.
Next, I’ll usually perform the track ‘LAVENDER SHOWERS,’ a digital hardcore song that is also high energy but with a different vibe that gets people moshing rather than dancing. Sometimes, I’ll bring out my guitar for this song and perform a solo in the middle. In between songs, I also recite a handful of my poems in the style of a spoken-word poetry recital. It pulls the audience into a different kind of experience, gives them a hiatus from the intense music, and prepares them for what’s coming. ‘Suroor’ is a song where my Pakistani influences come out—it’s my rendition of a qawwali song that is performed in a fundamentally different manner to Western music, where both the performer and the audience are meant to be sitting down cross-legged on the floor, huddled up close together. I invite the crowd to sit and form a circle with me and mix the qawwali with a shoegaze soundscape to create an ethereal effect and lull the audience into an intoxicating dream-like state before transitioning straight into the industrial club banger ‘t4t interlude’ that gets them both dancing and moshing again. These days, I end my sets with the track ‘Jashan-e-inqilab,’ where I channel my crowd work into a political twist. I wrote this song in 2022, celebrating revolutions against capitalism and the colonial empire.
In 2024, I dedicated the song to the Palestinian revolution against Israeli settler-colonialism by leading Palestinian protest chants at my sets right before performing the song. This not only serves to underscore the political message behind the song but also helps rile the crowd up and spark a revolutionary energy in the air before the performance. Through these diverse experiences, I aim to engage with the crowd in various ways to leave them with an unforgettable night. A fan once told me after a performance that even though my set was only 30 minutes long, it gave them the same feeling as when you go to the theatre to see a feature-length film that immerses you into a whole new world and leaves you a changed person by the end of the night. I try to channel that feeling into every single one of my performances.
How do you define success?
Success is having the platform to do what I love: making music, curating live experiences, and building community through art. Of course, there is a spectrum to that platform: making music professionally requires time and resources, and while I’m currently in a good position with the number of resources afforded to me, there is still plenty of room for me to grow in that capacity. For instance, having the financial resources to do music full-time would be a dream. It would allow me to put all of my energy into music without any distractions, and that’s one of my primary long-term goals for the future.
Beyond just time and energy, making and performing music can be an expensive endeavor in and of itself, especially for an artist like me who tries to cultivate innovative experiences and get experimental with her stage design and crowd-work. I always like to perform at venues with large stages and facilities for artists to get creative with visuals and lighting, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to play at venues like that often as of late. Still, in my heart, I want to go even more significant. Ideally, I want to perform at stadiums: gigantic stages with space to work with a group of backup dancers, large stage props to get innovative with my stage design, and fireworks and smoke machines in the background. A central performance-related desire of mine is to be strapped to the ceiling so I can fly over my audience as they do in plays, and I want to perform at venues that are resourceful enough to facilitate that. As mentioned in this interview, a significant aspect of my creative drive comes from the desire to push boundaries and tap into unbridled, limitless creativity. I strive to gather enough resources to fully execute my creative vision slowly.
One of the most joyful experiences I’ve had in music is my success as a touring artist. The euphoria I get from live performances is second to none, and to be able to go on tours where I play a different show every night to a whole new audience in an entire new city for weeks is a dream come true. To see so many people from so many different walks of life connect with me, my art, and my performative expression is an experience so meaningful that I often struggle even to process it. At the time of speaking, I have tours booked for 2024 in every central geographical region in the States (East Coast/West Coast/Midwest/South), and to be able to work with organizations and labels that provide me with the financial and logistical resources to perform around the country and develop a nation-wide following is my most significant success as of yet. This is not primarily because of any prestige or artistic acclaim but because it allows me to live my dream of connecting with people and building community through art every night. My future touring goal is to take the next step and perform overseas—I know it’s achievable since I already have somewhat of an international following. To plan a world tour where I can perform on every continent would be another dream come true.
Pricing:
- Shirts: $25
- Tapes: $10
- CDs: $10
- Poetry Zine: $10
- Stickers: $5
Contact Info:
- Website: www.suroor.org
- Instagram: instagram.com/suroor.901
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lavendershowers
- Other: suroor.bandcamp.com
Image Credits
Ben Wooley, Maggie Trisler, Window Johnson, Cameron Mitchell
