Adi & Dishaan Are Turning Their Hangout Sessions Into Hits 

Listening to Adi & Dishaan’s ten-track debut album Good Things Take Time gives you the same feeling you get while watching sun-soaked rays ripple through the surface of a swimming pool—soothed, swept up, and gently entranced. While songs like “Midnight” and “Say” have an easygoing, effervescent vibe that would fit right in at the afters, tracks like “Missed Calls” and “IDK” have edgier, more defiant undertones that echo the restless impulses of the young and unburdened. Packed with a soulful swagger and honey-dipped hooks, it’s almost as if this album was made to remind you that diving headfirst into the deep end can actually be a liberating rush. 

Sitting across from rapper and podcaster Aditya Lodha (better known as Adi) and singer-producer Dishaan Gidwani at the Rolling Stone India office, it’s easy to see why that’s the case. They are friends first, musical partners second. They crack the same kind of sarcastic, self-deprecatory jokes. They finish each other’s sentences.  

Two voices become one: While each of them kick-started their music careers independently, a chance meeting at Mumbai’s Antisocial club unexpectedly brought them together. “Our eyes met across the room, and that’s when we just instantly knew,” says Dishaan, his tone dripping with a hint of his signature sarcasm. Coincidentally, both of them picked up their first instruments at the age of 11, and were heavily influenced by their older brothers’ hip-hop mixtapes featuring artists like Kanye West, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne. But while they were trying and (admittedly) failing to find their footing individually as artists, they realized that working together could help them balance each other’s strengths. “I only felt skilled enough to be able to do [hip-hop], but there were all these other genres of music that I always wanted to dabble in,” says Adi. “What led to us wanting to work together was that he was referencing stuff that he had heard, but couldn’t do, and I was referencing stuff that I had heard, but I couldn’t do. So we just kind of filled in the gaps.” 

Letting loose: Over two years of listening sessions, late-night hangouts, and plenty of procrastination, Good Things Take Time slowly came to life. “It didn’t matter so much that, oh, we have to make this album [in a certain way],” points out Dishaan. “The album just kind of came through while we were hanging out and became about us having fun.” Kicking back and goofing around, they say, is what sparked the chemistry that’s apparent in every track on the album. “My favorite memory of working on this album was when Dishaan and I locked ourselves away in Lonavala for two weeks and just tried to come up with new ideas — a lot of our favorite songs like ‘IDK’ and ‘Math’ came from that two-week session,” says Adi, as Dishaan jokingly chimes in that it was “the live-in phase of our relationship.” 

Let’s get this show on the road: Fresh off their album release, they have finally hit the road—bringing their two-person act to Gurgaon, Goa, and Bengaluru. They also recently made their music festival debut at this year’s Lollapalooza India. “I think the Bengaluru show has been the craziest, where it was hard to hear ourselves on stage sometimes because we could only hear the crowd singing along [to our songs],” Dishaan says. Another element that’s become a special part of the Adi & Dishaan live experience is the way they perform their song “Missed Call.” “The song is about an angry voice message that you leave your ex,” he explains. “So we basically ask the audience, like, ‘Yo, has anyone broken up recently and wants to send their ex a voice note [of us singing the song]?’ When we tried this at a gig a year ago, before we put the album out, people were very hesitant, but now you’ll see 10-15 phones go up, and they’ll actually open their WhatsApp chats with their ex.” 

What’s next?: While the two want to take some time to focus on developing their solo projects, they’re also excited to experiment with a live band setup for their upcoming shows together on the festival circuit. “We also plan on releasing some bonus tracks from our album,” Adi says, hinting that they will soon be dropping a track called “Umami”—one of the first songs they created together, but didn’t feel confident enough to release until it was perfected. They also want to explore new ways to tell their story visually through BTS-style music videos that feel as fresh and relatable as their music.  

Going for the globe: Does the fact that they sing and rap in English mean their music attracts a more global audience? Not yet, but they’re working on it. “When we speak to some labels, for example, they are very hard-set on pushing our music in India,” Adi points out. “And I’ve always tried to explain that that doesn’t feel like the right approach for artists like us.” Given his background as a podcaster and host of the popular YouTube show The Having Said That Show, Adi sees their path forward as artists through leveraging the vast potential of the YouTube ecosystem. “Once you put something on YouTube, it’s a global export. I want to try and make our money through that. Why force ourselves to fit into some box here when we can try to do what we want and hopefully be successful doing it?”