Bandung, Indonesia · pop · art-pop

Isyana Sarasvati

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Indonesian pop star with conservatory training, swerving from radio ballads into prog-metal ambition.

Isyana Sarasvati was born in Bandung on 2 May 1993 and trained as a classical singer, studying at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore and later at the Royal College of Music in London. She has also performed as an opera singer in Singapore. As a teenager she won a Best Composer award at 15, and her composition 'Wings of Your Shadow' placed among the top entries at Tokyo's International Junior Original Concert, where she performed on electone.

She signed to Sony Music Indonesia in 2014, releasing the singles 'Keep Being You' and 'Tetap Dalam Jiwa' before her debut album, Explore! (2015), arrived. 'Tetap Dalam Jiwa' became one of the songs most associated with her, and she has written every song on each of her subsequent albums herself.

She writes and arranges much of her own material, and later records lean harder on her conservatory background, with orchestral and operatic writing sitting next to guitar-driven tracks. Lexicon (2019) marked a shift toward neo-classical and progressive rock, a direction carried into ISYANA (2023) and Eklektiko (2026).

Her public profile grew alongside the music: she opened the closing ceremony of the 2018 Asian Games before more than 55,000 people in Jakarta, and in 2019 recorded 'A Whole New World' for the Indonesian release of Aladdin, meeting composer Alan Menken in the process. A run of work with Raisa, including the single 'Anganku Anganmu', paired two of the country's better-known pop voices.

In 2020, after six years with Sony Music Indonesia, she founded her own independent label, Redrose Records. The following year she released the single '1+1' with her husband Rayhan, marking their first wedding anniversary.

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