Himanshu ‘Heems’ Suri teams up with Indian-American producer Lapgan to release their new collaborative album LAFANDAR via Veena Sounds, in partnership with Mass Appeal India. The project – Heems’ first body of work released in nearly a decade – finds him tackling Lapgan’s cinematic South Asian samples with all the internal rhyme and laugh-out-loud wit fans remember from his old tapes and work with Das Racist and Swet Shop Boys.
The word LAFANDAR is an old-country insult for a vagabond, a wanderer, a loomer, a lurker, an urban dilettante, and especially in Heems’ case, a flaneur. Heems casts the sprawling enclaves of Queens, New York, as outsider hip-hop’s natural home, with new subsects, dialects, references, and threats around every corner.
LAFANDAR features an eclectic collection of collaborations with artists from Heems’ world, including Kool Keith, Blu, Sid Sriram, Your Old Droog, Sir Michael Rocks, Open Mike Eagle, and more. The album includes the previously released singles “Accent,” featuring Saul Williams, the verse for which he first unveiled on a 2017 performance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and “Sri Lanka,” featuring Your Old Droog, their followup to fan-favorite track “Bangladesh.”
Last month, Heems formally launched his new magazine and brand, Veena. An ode to the collision of his South Asian heritage and New York roots, Veena is dedicated to and named after his mother, and explores the implementation of self care through Heems’ passions – fashion, flows and food. In celebration of its launch, Veena is releasing a product offering encompassing all three of its core tenets – Sounds, Wears and Naturals – including physical editions of both 2010 Das Racist mixtapes Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down Man, which are being made available on vinyl for the first time. Veena is also releasing two tees designed by Himanshu Suri and Peter Chung (Supreme, Polo) and 100% organic cold-pressed virgin coconut oil made in India.
On the connection between his music and his new endeavor with Veena, Heems says, “My world was one of graffiti and golgappas, skateboards and saris, music and Mughals, and so on. This is what my music sounds like.” Now he invites you to experience the expanding world he’s building.
