Papon has released "Apne Khilaaf," the first song from his upcoming album Mehfilz with Papon, penned by lyricist Irshad Kamil, whose writing has shaped soundtracks including Rockstar, Tamasha, Jab We Met, Raanjhanaa, and Love Aaj Kal. The track marks the beginning of a project centered entirely on original ghazals, a body of work Papon has been developing since 2017.
Mehfilz with Papon brings together two strands of the artist's musical practice that have run in parallel for years. One is Shaam-e-Mehfil with Papon, his live concert series blending ghazals, nazms, and reimagined Bollywood classics, which has toured cities including Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata, Jaipur, Bengaluru, and Delhi. The other is the more private tradition of intimate living-room mehfils, informal gatherings of music and poetry that Papon has described as a defining part of his creative life since his younger days. The new album fuses both into a single format: original compositions performed in a homely mehfil setting.
Announcing the release, Papon called the project a long-held ambition. "For a long time, I wanted to create a space where music, poetry, and emotions could come together in their most honest form. Mehfilz with Papon is that dream, and Apne Khilaaf is its very first offering," he said. He added that the work carries deep personal significance: "This project has truly been a dream for me. I have been working on it for a very long time, and it feels surreal that it is finally coming alive. Mehfils have always been a very important part of my musical journey since my younger days, and that emotional connection is what inspired this concept. Every part of it is extremely personal to me."
"Apne Khilaaf" was composed by Papon alongside Kalyan Baruah, with lyrics by Irshad Kamil and direction by Parasher Baruah. Papon said the collaboration with Kamil had been discussed long before the songs came together. "Irshad and I had discussed this idea long back, and while working on these songs, we consciously decided to keep the wordplay simple while retaining the beauty and writing techniques of ghazals."
The accompanying music video is staged as a mehfil surrounded by Papon's circle of collaborators and friends, including actor Pankaj Tripathi. Kamil appears in an opening segment introducing the ghazals and their origin story, framing the release as much as a shared gathering as a conventional music video.
Since the release of "Apne Khilaaf," the Mehfilz with Papon series has continued to expand. A second track, "Yaar Khafaa," followed as the album's next offering, continuing the same living-room presentation and extending Papon's stated journey into original ghazal writing. Both songs have been positioned as part of a larger album still being rolled out, with further tracks expected to follow the same format of intimate, mehfil-style performance.
The project arrives alongside Papon's ongoing Shaam-e-Mehfil tour, which has continued to expand into new cities even as the studio album takes shape, giving the artist a live counterpart to the recorded material. Taken together, the tour and the album mark one of the most concentrated efforts of Papon's career to center ghazals — a form he has long performed but rarely written from scratch — as original, standalone work rather than as part of a broader setlist.
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