When rapper, singer and songwriter Karan Aujla sat down with producer Ikky (aka Ikwinder Singh) at a Vancouver studio in August 2022, there were no concrete plans on the agenda. The two had known each other as fellow strivers in the Canadian Punjabi music scene since they were in their early teens. They’d even tried to make music before—in India, in 2019—without much success. But this time, something was different. “As soon as we sat down, something connected and it all just happened naturally,” Aujla tells Apple Music. “We came up with this idea and made this track, ‘Admirin’ You’. That’s where we [realised] that this is a great sound and a great direction we’re heading into. We decided to make more tracks in that direction, that genre, and make something new.” On Making Memories—with Ikky as executive producer—Punjabi folk vocal melodies and desi lyricism blend seamlessly with a lush, expansive pop sound rooted in contemporary soul, R&B and hip-hop. “I just want to change my whole catalogue, basically,” Aujla says. “I just think the world is changing, and we just need to bring in more Western stuff. In Punjabi [music], we need more of that.” While there are a couple songs that hew close to the aggressive, bars-heavy approach that Aujla’s fans expect of him, most of the songs on Making Memories showcase a gentler, more introspective facet of the musician. “I wanted to keep it more on the positive and happy side,” he says. “[Most of] these songs are very positive; there’s nothing crazy in them, lyrics-wise or even [the] melodies.” Here, Aujla talks us through the album, track by track. “Girl, I Love You (Euro’s Intro)” “Every time I listen to that intro, oh my God! It feels like you’re driving, it’s 1:30 a.m. The whole album is just a ‘listen to at night’ type of thing. Because most of my studio sessions [I was] working from 8 p.m. till 3 a.m. We made the whole album in that setting, so we kept that sound as well, that positive frequency. We named it ‘Euro’s Intro’ after my boy Euro, Jamal [Europe], on the project. He came up with this idea and he decided to make that intro sound the way it does.” “What...?” “This is the second last track I actually made on the project. Ikky and I were in LA for something [else] but we ended up in the studio as always. Ikky just played this beat and I fell in love with that R&B sound. It reminded me of back in the day, like ’90s R&B, hip-hop type of vibes. I thought, ‘We’ve got to get a Punjabi track on this.’ Yeah, we were just playing with it and it became something. We decided to name it ‘What...?’ because we didn’t even know what it was. ‘Like, what?!’” “Admirin’ You (feat. Preston Pablo)” “Preston [Pablo] is our brother. I met him through Ikky and his team. The first time I actually saw him and heard him singing live was in a studio, when we made ‘Admirin’ You’. We were all in the studio, we were humming and he was freestyling and we came up with this melody together. Then we told Preston to sing this line in Punjabi—‘kade mil ke baitho’ (‘sit together sometime’)—and he said ‘I’ll try it.’ He sang it in broken Punjabi but it sounded really nice. I was like, if somebody who doesn’t know our language can sing it easily, then we should go with this hook. “I’ll tell you a funny story. When I say ‘dekho tare’an di lo’ I’m basically saying, look at the stars. I was actually cruising in a Rolls Royce in Toronto with Ikky; we had half the track written but that line came from the idea that there were stars on the roof of the car, but there’s also stars out there [in the sky]. We could play with this in Punjabi, haina? Even in the music video, you’ll see me pointing at the ceiling of the Rolls Royce at the hook.” “Jee Ni Lagda” “That [sound] came more from Bruno Mars, that type of vibe. You know there’s this saying that we like to use the word ‘jatt’ in any song. But you would never really hear anyone talking about that desi or villager lifestyle on a beat like that. So that was the motive: We wanted to create this Western pop sound, but you still talk about really paindu (rural) things. That was the attempt. So, when I sing ‘Kude tere lyi mai change kita darji’ (‘Girl, I changed my tailor for you’), it’s so desi. You would never think of hearing the word ‘darji’ on a beat like this.” “Try Me” “That song, it’s just my style. It’s what comes naturally to me. It’s not even about the controversies or anything. I feel like ‘Try Me’ is just every Punjabi man, it’s just us. I always try to keep it relatable to Punjabis and still sound like me. But we never really did an old-school boom-bap beat-like hip-hop [before], so we tried that combination on this one. That’s why, at the end of the video, we kept that skit where [actor] Sangtar comes in and says ‘aa lai dikhaeta rok ke’(‘Here you go, I stopped you’). It gives it that funny perspective, so as to tell people it’s not that serious, it’s all a song. I even say in that skit, ‘Yo, shooting is going on, what are you doing here?’ And then we go back into the song. These are the little hints I’m trying to give the audience that it’s all for fun. At the end of the day, it’s a song.” “Champion’s Anthem” “There were no plans to make this track or put it [on the] album. It was our last session, three months [before the release]. We were just mixing the album and Ikky put this beat on, and we ended up getting one more track and decided to put it on the album. This song is me. I try to show my creativity in that song through my lyrics, basically. I tried to keep it as desi as I could. “There’s lines in that song like ‘Thonu kdr ki attea di dulle v ni hone / Tu ki bujegi hlaat dekhe chulle v ni hone’ (‘You can’t know the value of flour if you didn’t experience when it gets dropped / How can you imagine what it was like? You would not even have seen a chulha’—that’s a deep line, I think. There’s some people out here in Canada from our community who don’t even know what a chulha (traditional stove) looks like. We used to make food on that. So, talking about stuff like that on beats like this just made it really interesting; that was my whole goal. And that song is all about bars—it’s just bars, man.” “Softly” “Lyrics-wise and folk melody-wise, and [for] that flow and that happy sound, ‘Softly’ is one of my favourite tracks of my career. It’s so simple, and it’s such a storytelling song. It’s about a girl who is telling a lallari—a guy that colours your chunniyan (a long piece of cloth traditionally worn around the head, shoulders and neck) in the market in India—‘Hey, can you dye my chunni the same colour as my guy’s car?’ The chunni and the car: It’s just combining both cultures, really. The whole thing—the girl is talking about, I wanna go get my hair curled for you, shit like that. But it’s more in a desi way.” “You” “We made this in Vancouver again. Ikky and I had booked this studio; when we looked at the photos online, it looked pretty good. But when we went to the studio, it was literally a container cargo box. It was so small that four of us couldn’t fit in there. We talked to the guy [who ran the business]: ‘Yo, the photos looked different.’ But he said it would take two hours to get that studio freed up. We were there anyway, so we just made the track in that small container. That will be with me forever, that was such a memory. I wanted to make the track from the girl’s perspective, where she’s expressing her love. That was the whole point.” “Bachke Bachke (feat. Yarah)” “That’s all my boys—Jamal, [Kevin] Ekofo and Sandy [Schwisberg]—on the keys. Everybody together, with Ikky basically directing them. The outro of ‘Bachke Bachke’ is next level. I’m not just saying that because it’s my album. I’ve said it in an interview earlier as well: Please listen to the album from the intro to the last one without any delays in between the songs, so you know about the transitions and everything we worked on. And the way that this track ends is just amazing. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible and have that keyword in the hook. Everybody says ‘bachke bachke’ (‘beware, beware’) in our language, it’s such a common word. [This song is] one of those cruise tracks, something you listen to while you’re driving. There’s those gang vocals on that, a lot of voices coming together on [the chorus]. I feel like it was the perfect track to end the album on.”