Ditty’s New Album ‘Kali’ Addresses War, Environmentalism and Optimism

Like a proud artist, Ditty holds up the vinyl for her latest album Kali over our Zoom video call. On the cover—shot by her friend and photographer Menty Jamir—Ditty, the Berlin-based, Indian singer-songwriter is posing on the ground among the weeds, hands above her. “I wanted to be an embodiment of feminine energy, and also wanted it to be outdoors […] I wore my wedding saree,” she says.

The LP record is made from recycled materials and while Kali is Ditty’s second album, it’s the first to go into record stores in Germany and other parts of Europe, via the label Cloud Hills. “The only other South Asian artists you find here in Germany are [Pakistan-origin singer-songwriter] Arooj Aftab and [alternative act] Peter Cat Recording Co., so yeah, it’s an honor, I think,” Ditty admits.

Ditty released her 2019 debut album Poetry Ceylon on vinyl as well, but that was DIY. Is she glad that a label has taken over that side of things? “It’s two-sided, right? I enjoyed making that record. I’ve also designed all of this myself. For Poetry Ceylon, it was a lot of fun to get into the production process and to do it independently. With this, I’m really happy we pressed vinyl, so now I have two records. It’s crazy,” she says.

Just before the release of Poetry Ceylon, the single “Deathcab” gave Ditty one of her most popular songs. Her biggest hope for the 10-track Kali is that it gets “if not as much, then more love than ‘Deathcab.’” She says, “I think reaching there has felt completely impossible for me. Like, I had one big hit, and now I don’t know how to get back there or how to put out music like that.” With a song blowing up on that level, Ditty searched far and wide for the right representation and management in India but said it was “really challenging” and found people ghosting her after coming on board.

KALI by DITTY

With this album out now, Ditty hopes that she can find the right teams to put together an India tour. She says, “I want to tour a lot, but I also want to do it in a good, slow, conscious way, and I want to make more music – work with really nice musicians. This is an audio-visual record, so I want to take it one step further next time and I want to make a concept.”

Ditty’s positivity is her real strength, even if the topics she explores on Kali are sometimes bleak. In a true folk songwriter sense, there’s cynicism but also satire, especially on tracks like “Money.” Half the songs, including “Money”—which questions consumerism at the cost of exploiting natural resources—were on her 2024 EP Skin. Songs like “Home In My Skin” are intimate, while “Azadi”—released as the Aravali Forest Version recorded outdoors—is political, and so is “Dunya (For Our Children),” which specifically calls out genocide in Palestine as well as humanity’s unchecked war against mother nature in the larger sense.

“I’m a really optimistic person, so I think the world will learn how to deal with what they’ve done, or come to terms and change their ways, at some point,” she says. Each track draws inspiration from a life experience, from the vanishing forests close to her home in Goa with “Money” to growing up dark-skinned and being plied with homemade remedies like scrubbing lemons by her grandmothers in “Kali”. “I think just moving to Germany and being exposed to so much structural racism, being treated in a really weird way, I wanted to write about this,” she explains.

Living in Germany also made it difficult for her to openly talk about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. She wrote “Dunya (For Our Children)” in September last year, exploring what happens when people become “accustomed to the war.” In the second verse of the Hindi-English song, Ditty also alludes to the war on our environment, with lyrics that say: “Black and brown bodies and/Mountains and valleys and/Minerals, mines, arms, water, oil & money as/Genocide continues on our lands.” Living away from New Delhi, Ditty says she began to ask more questions about the climate crises that the capital has often found itself mired in, especially when it comes to air pollution.

She wrote “Dunya” fairly quickly and played it to her drummer, seasoned artist Andi Haberl (from indie-electronica band The Notwist). It was also created with help from producer and multi-instrumentalist Bowls aka Dhruv Bhola (from Peter Cat Recording Co.). Ditty says the process with Bowls was often to record demos and “keep trying to layer the songs with different instruments.” She adds, “I think we both know each other’s styles quite well by now, because we’ve worked for so many years together.” Of course, with Bowls now off touring the world with Peter Cat, Ditty half-jokes that it was “really heartbreaking” when she couldn’t tour with him any longer. “I have a new band now, I have to move on,” she adds.

Ditty’s For Our Children tour kicks off on Mar. 28 and travels mostly across Germany and Czech Republic, closing on Apr. 12 in Berlin. Although she’s toured India often, this is Ditty’s longest international run. “[It] feels wild, really,” she says. “Even musicians from here are like, ‘How did you manage this?’ It’s going to be great. I just hope people show up, especially kids. My goal is even if 50 to 100 people show up [at] every show, I’ll be very happy.”