Tara Lily sings in hushed vocals over stark, woody percussion as trickling piano keys and a mournful violin hover in the air. She wanders about a mountainside draped in fog and bathes in the warm light of a bonfire. This is the music video for “No Way Out,” her most recent release, which was filmed in the Nepali Himalayas as part of her recent Asia tour, which eventually brought her here to Bangkok. Her music fuses a formal jazz education with the sounds of her South London upbringing, as well as classical Indian music inspired by her Bengali roots. It ranges from introspective downtempo and purist jazz to atmospheric dnb tunes, depending on the mood she’s in.

Jazz grime is not a combination of sounds that many people have heard of, but it was a natural place to start for Lily, and her debut track “Who Saw Who” was one of the first of its kind. When she was just 16 years old, she started work on it with Jammer BBK, the veteran grime artist who produced the track. It took two years before it dropped because she wanted to make sure everything fit perfectly. “Finding a balance with live musicians on recorded music is difficult,” she explains over pad thai at a busy street food alleyway in Silom. “The song and my voice are at the forefront and if you try layering that over a saxophone and a bass and all these other things it sounds very chaotic.” Undaunted, she committed to the idea and had a live drummer recreate the grime beat during the chorus. To make sure it sounded clean, they quantized his section, using digital tools to force the rhythm into a strict grid, which is something that live artists usually frown on.

This notion of bucking established ideas of what an instrument or genre is generally expected to sound like is something that Lily, who is 25 now, has no problem usurping. “If you’re a purist, you want to keep a sax sounding like a sax,” she says. “But I’m using everything for its character within the mix of sounds to create an overall vibe, as opposed to everything having its own distinct personality. I’m a singer primarily, and these recordings are songs.” So, for example, she’ll incorporate Indian classical elements like the sitar and drones from a manipulated tanpura that fit cleanly alongside synths and electronics.

But when Lily is performing live, she lets instrumentalists rock out and happily invites musicians on stage where there’s space for it. Sometimes she’ll play with a full live band who help recreate her songs with extra space for improvisation, including drums, bass, keys, a synth, sax, and sitars. But on smaller stages, like her performance at Blaq Lyte Shophouse, she’ll play solo, limiting herself to a controller with a keyboard or synth.

Growing up in multicultural London is foundational to Lily’s sound. While she had a formal high school musical education mainly centered around jazz, she was also surrounded by a vibrant dance music scene and thriving rave culture. But gentrification and the pandemic have threatened that environment, and she says that the ecosystem is crashing these days. One point of hope she sees is the growing visibility of South Asian artists there in recent years. “It was hard entering the scene as a young girl of color,” she says. “But now there’s a big underground scene growing for Asians, and I feel very lucky to be a part of it, to be surrounded by a community. The generations before me didn’t really have that.”

While Lily’s sound is still very niche, making it hard for her to secure spots on playlists, it’s also very approachable and interesting to people from many different walks of life. On this Asia tour she’s played with folk-rock artists in Nepal, electronic parties across India, a traditional jazz club in Hong Kong, and club spaces in Bangkok, just to name a few: “Most people can find something in my music to relate to.”