It’s been a couple of weeks since the remake of Tu Hai Kahan has been released — the song in which world-renowned British Pakistani singer Zayn Malik collaborates with a young Pakistani band called AUR, ostensibly giving them a marketing boost of a lifetime. I’ll admit that when the song first came out, I hated it.

What can I say? There’s nothing exceptional about it. Why even bother getting Zayn to perform on it when the song is only going to sound like the same ol’ run-of-the-mill Pakistani electropop track?

Musically, Tu Hai Kahan utterly and completely fails to deliver anything truly unique or exciting. Knowing that Zayn has sung in Urdu for the very first time in this single shouldn’t be why it’s so popular — the song has amassed over 7.5million views on YouTube at the time of writing this. Sadly, the song fails to impress on its own musical merits.

Granted, most of the time I had heard the song initially was on the radio. Musicians are divided on this: some will argue that radio is no place to effectively judge a song, while others design the final mastering of their track on how the song will sound once it’s played inside a car. The latter argue that a good sound system inside a car truly gives that surround sound experience.

AUR’s collaboration with Zayn Malik on Tu Hai Kahan has propelled the young Pakistani band into the global music stratosphere. But does the song live up to the hype?

Listening to the same ‘lacklustre’ song on the headphones gives a completely different experience, however. Tu Hai Kahan was actually a song the band (AUR is named after its band-members Ahad, Usama and Raffey) released around seven months ago. When you listen to both, you definitely see how Zayn added a much-needed ‘oomph’ to the song, especially in the chorus, which is elevated from being lightly hummed in the Zayn-less version to being beautifully belted out, in the melismatic singing style, in the new version.

Tu Hai Kahan still has the same typical tropes of a standard electropop track being released in the Pakistani music scene nowadays. The song had a very decent round of success when it was released online last year (it’s actually amassed 136 million plays on Spotify and over 100 million views on YouTube). This version of Tu Hai Kahan kicks off with distorted vocals and guitar samples with bits of Zayn’s falsetto improvisations that’s nothing out of the ordinary in the beginning. The AUR section of the song has the band members rap some pretty decent, well-written lyrics throughout the song.

Tu Hai Kahan’s lyrics are the song’s strongest point. They’re very introspective, reflect a mature approach to love, and you see the struggle between wanting to suffocate the object of your affection with your emotions but also wanting to respect their space… it’s all very coming of age.

Considering you can visibly see the band growing up from one video (the first version of the song) to the other (the Zayn Malik version) this makes sense.

Zayn eases into the song, always with a section right before the chorus, so seamlessly you don’t even notice at first that he’s taken over. The video doesn’t actually show him singing any parts and I think that adds a little mystery to the song itself. Here’s hoping he continues to practise his vocal singing chops in Urdu.

How did AUR manage to pull off this collaboration? The release of the song is the result of a joint effort between the US-based indie label D36, which aims to boost South Asian music, and Sony Music Entertainment (Middle East). This is only Zayn’s second release after last summer’s Love Like This, which itself was released after a hiatus of several years.

So, miss it or listen to it? Sure, listen to it, but never in the car. This is not a song that will make itself heard and enjoyed by its audience even with a little background noise. And in Pakistan on the road, there is always a lot of background noise.

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 28th, 2024