Coke Studio Nu.WAV continues its journey with Rangeen, bringing together Hasan Raheem and Izzchugtai on a song produced by Umair that turns longing, love, and youthful romance into something considerably brighter.
Rangeen began with a beat passed from Umair to Hasan, eventually finding its melody almost instinctively during a drive home. Rather than polishing away the spontaneity of what emerged, Umair allowed his hip-hop instincts to meet the song’s more classical character, creating a record that stays light on its feet even as it carries an unmistakable sense of yearning. Hasan reaches towards affection, while Izzchugtai’s arrival shifts the energy once again, giving the song another colour and dimension.
The music video, directed by Arham Ikram, takes the familiar language of filmi romance and turns it playfully askew. Against a pastel version of Lahore, Hasan finds himself on a rooftop during Basant, where a chance glimpse of a girl across the way becomes the beginning of an entire romance, at least in his imagination. Kites fill the sky, stones are tossed towards balconies, and an infatuated hero begins constructing a future with someone he has barely met.
What follows plays out through the logic of a daydream. Hashim Ali’s production design reimagines Lahore not quite as it exists, but as it might live in memory: pastel façades, patterned tiles and fabric, old computers, CDs, cassettes and film posters drawing from an early-2000s childhood. As Hasan’s imagined romance gathers momentum, the world around him becomes increasingly colourful, heightened and deliberately unreal.
Speaking about Rangeen, Kamal Khan, Executive Producer, Coke Studio Nu.WAV, said: “Rangeen was kind of easy in the best way. Hasan and Umair already had it. The song, the world, everything. They knew Izzchugtai would work. Arham knows Hasan well enough to just get it. He brought this cool, filmy, coming-of-age feel to the whole video. He just belongs in that. And Hashim, Aamir and Faraz made the whole thing look incredible.”
And, as with most fantasies, reality eventually has other plans. As the imagined courtship approaches what appears to be its inevitable conclusion, the arrangement opens into shehnai, played by Muhammad Salim, for a wedding that brings the fantasy rather abruptly back to earth. Rangeen, however, refuses to turn heartbreak into tragedy. There may always be another rooftop, another Basant and perhaps another romance waiting somewhere beneath a sky full of kites.
