Quiet Light is Riya Mahesh, a Texas producer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist who makes what she calls "dream sequences" — Lynchian, liminal electropop built out of sparse songwriting, ambient haze, and folk bones. She writes the songs after hospital shifts: Mahesh has been a medical student alongside the music, which may explain why so much of her work feels like it happens at 3 a.m., half awake, in a place that is quiet but not safe.
Her path here was not a straight line. She didn't get into Juilliard's vocal performance program and thought her music career had ended before it started. Instead she self-produced her way forward — a self-titled EP in 2020, then a run of her own projects including the first Blue Angel Sparkling Silver (2023) — before signing with True Panther Records.
"Berlin" started life as a 2025 single and became the lead single for her True Panther debut mixtape Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2, released April 24, 2026 — written, produced, performed, and recorded by Mahesh herself, with saxophone on this track from Henry Solomon. The FADER describes the song as one that "begins slowly before veering into a drum-driven call into the void," and Paste's review places its scene — a party, an ER visit, stitches — inside the album's slow breakdown of a romantic fantasy. More than one listener has heard the chorus open up like Avril Lavigne's "Complicated": a melody that sounds effortless until it turns into a cathartic sing-along. The album around it has been praised by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, NPR, and NME, and she has taken it on a UK and European headline tour this fall. Not bad for a career that supposedly ended at the Juilliard door.
— Red Hector
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