INTERVIEW: Indonesian Indie Act Hindia Speaks His Uncaged Heart Through Sound

By Danial Martinus  •  12 Aug 2025 in Interview

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Some artists write songs. Hindia writes entire rooms you can walk into. Spaces filled with flickering memories, the smell of rain on asphalt, and that ache in your chest you can’t quite name.

We talked to the artist, also known as Baskara Putra, in conjunction with Apple’s ‘Here’s to the Dreamers’ campaign highlighting creative Southeast Asian trailblazers and celebrating the stories that shaped them.

Finding one’s self is a lengthy but necessary process

Before he was Hindia, Baskara Putra was the voice out front of two Indonesian bands, namely the political firebrand .Feast and the kaleidoscopic Lomba Sihir. Those years taught him the craft. But more importantly, they taught him perspective.

“After spending a handful of time with each band, I’ve realised that it’s totally okay to treat each of my music projects as amalgamations of all the experiences I’ve gathered during my time with them,” he shares with JUICE.

Music, for him, isn’t just the chords or the mix, it’s the lens you choose to see it through. And that lens shifted when he decided to step out alone. “I told my bandmates in .Feast that one day I would want to explore a solo project… It felt unfair for me to talk only about my personal stuff as the sole lyricist back then. So, I ventured out and that was how Hindia came about.”

The move was less a career pivot than a survival instinct—the need to speak plainly, without diluting the specifics that made his story real.

His debut, Menari dengan Bayangan, was basically a fever dream in diary form, full of late-night confessions and unfiltered words. But if that record was about urgency, his latest work feels like breathing after the panic has passed.

“I learned not to hold on to something too tight. It’s suffocating on both ends,” he says of Doves, a record born from decluttering, not just his shelves, but his own mental load.

But Hindia has always been disarmingly direct. “I made a promise with myself that whatever happens, I need to always speak the truth—not figuratively, but literally—in my lyrics,” he says. The truths he shares are rooted in real textures and turns; they’re not just vague placeholders for heartbreak.

“I wanted to make something that directly speaks to me in the face,” he shares.

An open book

It’s this sense of specificity that makes his songs feel universal. He doesn’t write with a particular audience in mind, yet somehow his words mirror the private struggles of thousands.

“Most of us experience the same thing—just with different skins and templates,” he says.

Still, carving out an identity in a scene as competitive as Indonesia’s wasn’t easy. “It can be quite a steep journey to consistently show others your craft until they can see the silver lining and consistent identities behind them,” he admits. Today, that trust allows him to take risks.

But if there’s a cost to being this open, it’s the erosion of his anonymity. The increased visibility initially felt like a cage. But now it’s just part of the deal, or a “fixed cost” as Hindia calls it.

There’s a payoff, though. It comes in moments like his recent headline show at Tennis Indoor Senayan. For Baskara, it wasn’t just about the numbers—though 5,000 people in a sold-out venue is no small feat—it was about the history. He’d grown up watching his heroes play that stage.

And to stand there, under the same lights, knowing those thousands came solely for Hindia, was a quiet dream realised.

 “It made me realise the importance of dreaming big, to ‘Dream Beyond’,” he says, referencing Apple’s ‘Here’s to the Dreamers’ campaign motto. “Believing that whatever seems hard today would bear something beautiful later… the process is supposed to be hard, sometimes even feel impossible—but that happens, and it will happen. That’s certainty.”

And that, folks, is the paradox of Hindia. His music often sits in the heaviness of the now, cataloguing the mess and weight of being alive. But somewhere beneath the ache, there’s the glowing belief that beauty comes after the hard parts.

Maybe that’s why his songs feel like they belong to you just as much as they belong to him. Because in the quiet, you realise you’ve been carrying the same weight, and suddenly you’re not alone in the room anymore.

Listen to Doves, ’25 on Blank Canvas below:

Click here to learn more about Apple’s ‘Here’s to the Dreamers’ campaign.

For more features, head to JUICE Malaysia.