Raveena

Raveena Aurora's parents fled Punjab after the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms that killed her maternal uncle and burned the family business. They settled in Queens, then moved to a house surrounded by woods in Stamford, Connecticut, where a young Raveena grew up speaking Punjabi at home and singing in the bathroom for hours, teaching herself to treat her voice like an instrument. She was 8 when she first heard Ella Fitzgerald and decided she wanted to sing.

She studied at NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, and by 2016 was posting songs on SoundCloud. Her debut EP, Shanti, arrived in 2017 and built a small, devoted following. Two years later she released Lucid, a 12-track debut album distributed through Empire. The title referred to a version of herself she felt had been lost after years of sexual assault and abuse between the ages of 17 and 22. Through songs like "Stronger" and "Salt Water," she wrote about trauma and survival with unflinching specificity. NPR named Lucid one of the best albums of 2019. A Tiny Desk Concert followed that October.

In 2022, she signed to Warner Records and released Asha's Awakening, a concept album told from the perspective of a Punjabi space princess. She had spent years studying 1970s Bollywood soundtracks, and her family helped write and translate Hindi lyrics for the record. Rolling Stone, NPR, and Clash each placed it on their best-of-2022 lists. That April, she became the first woman of Indian descent to perform as a solo artist at Coachella, opening with a cover of "Dum Maro Dum" from the 1971 Bollywood film Hare Krishna Hare Ram.

Her third album, Where the Butterflies Go in the Rain, came out in June 2024 on Empire and her own Moonstone Recordings label. She wrote roughly 115 songs before narrowing the tracklist to 14. The album blends R&B with pop, jazz, and Indian instrumentation, and features a collaboration with JPEGMAFIA on "Junebug." A deluxe edition followed in early 2025.

Outside of music, Raveena launched the Aurora Loving Kindness Project in November 2021, a mutual aid initiative she personally funded to provide micro-grants and mentorship to Black, Brown, and queer musicians who are survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Born in Massachusetts, raised in Connecticut, and based in New York, she records under the mononym Raveena.