Nusantara Beat

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Amsterdam group formed in 2021, reworking Indonesian keroncong and folk traditions into something closer to pop — heritage music handled by a diaspora generation.

Nusantara Beat came together in Amsterdam in 2021, a six-piece band drawing on the Indonesian music their families brought to the Netherlands. Keroncong, the string-led song form that developed in Java out of Portuguese instruments, sits at the centre of what they play, alongside folk material gathered from across the archipelago.

Much of the band's cue comes from Indonesian pop of the 1960s, when local musicians began working electric guitars and Western rhythm sections into older forms. Surf-style guitar lines and funk grooves sit next to the keroncong strings, and the arrangements pull toward psych rock as often as toward straight pop.

Vocals are sung in Indonesian, and the songs are built around drums and electric guitar rather than the acoustic settings the older repertoire usually gets. Nusantara Beat treats keroncong and folk material as something to rework rather than preserve intact, closer to a live pop set than a heritage recital.

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