In 2024—after years of hinting at his struggles in oblique, punny song lyrics and cryptic, quickly deleted tweets— is finally done hiding his trauma. In February, the Punjabi American rapper dropped his first full-length release in eight years, , rediscovering the joys of rocking up to the mic after years in self-imposed musical exile. , his second album of the year, takes a clear-eyed look at what dimmed that joy in the first place: the complex PTSD, chemical dependencies, and self-sabotage that dragged him away from the light.
Produced almost entirely by Melbourne’s Sid Vashi—whose day job is in psychiatry—this is rap as self-directed therapy. These are not entirely unfamiliar waters. Heems has always interspersed his meta-satirical bars with personal accounts of his experiences with racism in a post-9/11 America.
But the struggles that he is processing here aren’t only personal—he’s also tackling the generational trauma left behind by cataclysmic historical events like the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, which killed over a million people and turned millions more into refugees overnight. A few decades later, in the 1980s, a separatist insurgency and state repression in the Indian half of Punjab forced tens of thousands to flee the country. In a fractured homeland or as diasporic exiles, everyday Punjabis found themselves living hard lives in hard circumstances.
Most of the time, Punjabi families (including mine) don’t like to discuss, or even acknow.