For Quiet Light, duality is a fact of life: “Everything is way more connected than we think”

O f all the settings for an NME interview, a Cover star coming straight from a hospital shift might be a first.

Yet this is how we find Riya Mahesh, the Texan producer and singer behind the project Quiet Light : on the phone in a comfy T-shirt, just off work at the hospital where she’s on rotation.

“Right now, my life is kind of a ‘9 to 5’ and then ‘5 to 11’,” she says, a hint of exhaustion beneath the excitement.

Mahesh is attending medical school on the east coast, “finishing up a few requirements” after taking time off last year for her blossoming indie music career.

Since teaching herself to produce during the pandemic, she’s released music prolifically and independently as Quiet Light – “dream sequences”, as she calls them, a delicate blend of folk , alt-pop and ambient soundscapes.

Her latest release, the mixtape ‘Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2’, dropped in April and marked her signing to True Panther, the tastemaking label behind Oklou , Grace Ives and Model/Actriz .

Most nights lately, Mahesh’s “5 to 11” means driving from the hospital to a dance studio, rehearsing for her biggest show so far: she’s been handpicked by Olivia Rodrigo to perform at the pop superstar’s new music festival, Daisy Chain Fields .

Miraculously, no one at the hospital has any idea.

“Still nobody knows! It’s pretty amazing,” Mahesh says cheerfully.

It’s a cliché, but she nods when we make the Hannah Montana comparison, having worked incognito alongside colleagues for months.

“The stakes are so high – people are literally dying.

Your personal life is not part of the equation,” she says of hospital work.

“It’s super humbling, and kind of awesome, to go to a job every day where you’re just there to serve other people.” “It’s pretty crazy watching music turn into more of a job for me, versus before when it was just this thing I did on the side,” she notes.

Asked how she’s holding both halves together, she doesn’t pretend to have it solved.