Curtain Blue got his name from a room. Long before the single or the tour, Abhishek Bhatia was producing his first song on a laptop in an empty, drab room with blue curtains, so he named the track after them. “Somewhere along the way I started associating myself with the name, and it just stuck,” he says. “There was no big thought behind it then, but over time it became my identity as an artist.”
Lately, this name is attached to “Yeh Duniya,” a harmonium-led track that has crossed 1.5 million streams across platforms and has been turning up all over Instagram feeds. It is the widest introduction yet to the New Delhi producer, composer, and singer, and it has a lot of new listeners asking the same thing: who is Curtain Blue?
India’s independent scene first knew Bhatia as the frontman of alternative act The Circus, which spent years playing across India, the U.K., and Southeast Asia. He describes the band without much ceremony. “The Circus was always about four boys having fun together. There was a certain energy that came with that.” The solo project came from somewhere else. “Curtain Blue is much softer in nature. It became a doorway into a more emotional side of me, and gave me a space to say things I probably couldn’t have said through The Circus.”
A Curtain Blue song might set a harmonium, sarangi, tabla, and dholak beside trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and analog synths. The result draws on electronica and indie pop, with the layered arrangements of a film score. This kind of a sound usually gets filed under fusion, a word Bhatia sidesteps. “I don’t really look at it as fusion. To me, it’s just a sound palette,” he says. “A harmonium can sit next to an israj or sarangi, a trombone, trumpet or clarinet, or sometimes Indian brass. Together, that’s a sound in itself.”
Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
Asked what he steers away from, Bhatia points to predictability. “‘Lazy’ to me is anything that feels predictable, where the choices haven’t really been thought through or felt,” he says. “I’m less interested in where an instrument comes from and more in what it makes me feel in that moment.”
“Yeh Duniya” started really simple. Bhatia at a harmonium, playing chords and singing the line that became its chorus. From there he went straight into production, sampling his own voice into the track and layering in what surrounds the core later. He doesn’t have a fixed order in how he begins his songs. Some start with a few chords, others with nothing more than a sarangi echo over a beat. “Usually I just start with whatever feels right,” he says.
That range has taken Curtain Blue beyond standalone releases. His track “Pardesi” featured in the opening episode of Made in Heaven Season 2, while “Piya Ghar Aaya - Homecoming,” made with Akhil Sachdeva, brought his sound to the film Awarapan 2. He has also taken it into fashion, creating what he calls “folktronica” for Anita Dongre’s showcases, pairing Rajasthani folk and classical instruments with atmospheric electronics. For Gaurav Gupta, he worked in the opposite direction, building dense electronic arrangements around treated vocals to accompany the designer’s sculptural couture. Elsewhere, he reworked the UEFA Champions League anthem as a brass-band performance with Heineken and performed at Homo Faber 2026 in Venice as part of an Indian creators and artisans delegation backed by JSW Foundation.
Off the clock, his days are as layered as his songs. “I pace around a lot, listen to trombone-heavy jazz, talk to a friend on the phone while making my coffee with unnecessary precision,” he says. “I hang out with Zaha, my baby dog, a lot.” When the schedule allows, he stays back in a city for a few days after a show. “I guess bits of all that inevitably make it into the music.”
Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
He has plenty of cities to linger in at the moment. Curtain Blue is in the middle of his Autumn-Winter Tour, which moves between four live formats: live solo, hybrid solo, live trio, and a full live band. The run opened at Homo Faber in Venice and has taken in AkasaGathering in Ladakh and stops in Bangalore, Kochi, and Delhi. Next up is Hylo in Mumbai on October 23, followed by shows in Pune and Goa.
The tour builds to a live band set at Lollapalooza India in Mumbai on January 23, 2027, and more dates are still to be announced. Bhatia isn’t giving away much about what comes after, beyond promising there’s more on the way. For a solo project named after some curtains in a drab room, the rooms are getting much bigger.
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