Some ideas arrive with a plan. Others begin with a single song and reveal their larger meaning along the way. For composer and producer Arjuna Harjai and singer-songwriter Remee, Elementals began with the intention of making just one track. Two days later in a Mumbai studio, that idea had expanded into a four-track EP shaped around Fire, Hawa, Mitti and Paani. Released on 11 September 2026, the project brings together music, language and emotion through four elements that feel familiar in nature yet endlessly open to interpretation.
Each track explores a different emotional landscape. Fire carries intensity and desire, Hawa evokes movement and freedom, Mitti returns to the grounding force of home and identity, while Paani moves towards attraction and surrender. The concept gave the artists a framework, but the music remained guided by instinct. “It went back and forth,” Arjuna explains, reflecting on the relationship between the elements and the emotions behind them. “A musical idea might suggest an emotion, and then thinking about the element would influence where we took it next.” Rather than treating the four elements as fixed symbols, the EP explores how feelings shift, overlap and acquire new meanings.
That fluidity extends to the cultural influences behind the record. Arjuna’s musical identity is shaped by Indian melodic instincts, phrasing and the emotional nuances of language, even when his production moves into different genres. He is interested in making music that can hold Indian and international influences in the same space, allowing each to contribute to a sound that continues to evolve. During a songwriting camp in Romania, he noticed how listeners responded to Indian musical and linguistic touches in his songs, even when they did not understand the words. The experience reinforced his belief that cultural specificity can create connection far beyond its immediate context.
For Remee, that openness is closely tied to her upbringing. Growing up in Thailand as a third-culture kid, between Indian heritage and an international education, she spent years feeling that she did not fit entirely into any one identity. With time, she began to see that experience differently. Instead of belonging to just one place, she could find pieces of herself across many cultures. “I think she was right,” she says of her friend Natalie Glebova’s decision to dedicate a chapter titled “Curiosity” to her in the book I Am Winning. Curiosity, for Remee, has become a way of understanding both herself and the world around her.
It is a perspective that comes through in Elementals, where language becomes part of the music’s texture as much as its meaning. English, Bengali, Hindi and Punjabi each bring their own rhythms, associations and emotional registers to the project. Remee describes singing Hindi and English over an amapiano-influenced sound as feeling less like a collision of genres and more like a conversation. The result is a musical world where different influences can coexist without needing to be separated or explained.
And then there is the visual world of Elementals, where the four tracks find their own identities through colour, silhouette and clothing. Oversized jackets became an unexpected way to translate the music into something tangible. Arjuna’s wife, Divya Harjai, who styled him for the songs’ social media content, found four jackets in a single shop, each one seemingly made for a different element. Fire arrived in black and orange with flame graphics; Mitti took shape in earthy red and khaki tones with South Asian artwork; Hawa brought together black and blue with imagery of wind and thunder; and Paani settled into an oversized sea-blue silhouette.
The wardrobe became an extension of the sound, giving each song a distinct visual character while keeping the project connected as a whole. It is a small but telling detail: sometimes, the identity of a creative work emerges not only through its central idea, but through the unexpected objects that make that idea visible.
Away from the studio, Arjuna’s creative life moves between music production, cinematic short-form videos and family life with Divya. He speaks candidly about the difficulty of slowing down, admitting that even on trips he often carries his laptop and finds himself working on another idea. Learning to spend time without turning every moment into something productive is a practice he is still exploring. That instinct to keep creating sits interestingly alongside the EP’s elemental framework, which draws its meaning from things that simply exist: warmth, wind, earth and water.
A recent trip to Wales brought the project into focus for him. Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the sea, surrounded by a rocky beach, mountains and shifting weather, he began to recognise all four elements in the same landscape. The sun carried Fire, the breeze became Hawa, the rocks and mountains suggested Mitti, and the sea brought Paani into view. What had begun as a musical concept in Mumbai had found a physical expression in a place far removed from where it was created.
Perhaps that is what makes Elementals compelling: its four parts offer different ways of looking at the same world. Through music, cultural identity and visual expression, Arjuna Harjai and Remee create space for those differences to exist together, without forcing them into a single definition. The elements remain distinct, yet connected by the very forces that make them what they are.
Somewhere between the first note and the final horizon, Elementals finds its own kind of harmony.
