Parvaaz's Na Gul Na Gulistan opens with chants of revolution and ends with a voice telling a man to hold on. At its centre is what many call "the saddest song ever heard": the last recorded call of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a Hawaiian bird singing for a mate that never answered. Six years, a pandemic and a founding guitarist's exit in the making, the Bengaluru band's third album is their most vulnerable work, and a rare Indian rock record that asks to be heard in one sitting, and earns it.

Na Gul Na Gulistan at a glance

  • Released: 5 December 2025, under exclusive licence to AWAL
  • Format: third studio album; eight tracks, about 37 minutes
  • Title: Urdu for "Neither Flower Nor Garden"
  • Line-up: Khalid Ahamed (vocals), Bharath Kashyap (guitar), Fidel D'Souza (bass), Sachin Banandur (drums)
  • Guests: Turkish musicians Ömer Göktepeliler (tambur) and Şükrü Tırkış (clarinet)
  • On Spotify's Rock in India: "Kauaʻi ʻōʻō", track 20 when we checked on 13 October 2026
  • Verdict: patient, grieving and quietly defiant; worth every year of the wait

Why did Parvaaz's new album take six years?

Kun arrived in 2019; then the world stopped. "After 2019, the pandemic shut everything down for about two years," Banandur told Indulge Express. "Around the same time, our ex-guitarist left, and finding a new guitarist took time." That was co-founder Mir Kashif Iqbal. Kashyap joined in 2021; this is his first album with them.

The title track was the seed: a melody Ahamed sent from Kashmir during the pandemic. It was recorded as a standalone single, then shelved, which the band now calls "a blessing in disguise". They decided instead "to go back to what we do best and to release an album," they told The Indian Music Diaries.

Parvaaz can afford patience: the band runs as a private limited company and pays its members salaries from gig earnings, the self-reliance we traced in how Indian rock learned to do it itself.

What does Na Gul Na Gulistan sound like?

The band calls the record a "dialogue on hope—fragile, fleeting and often lost", and the sequencing makes the argument. "Hu", under two minutes of atmosphere, thins to a lone guitar playing the riff that opens "Talafi", a six-minute blues-rock song about "the tension between outer cheer and inner chaos". It is one of the few songs the band played live before recording. Rolling Stone India heard Kashyap's "soul-drenched, sonorous guitar work right off the bat".

"Dogma" carries an echoing, U2-like expanse, with keys doing real melodic work. Ahamed told Rock Street Journal the new approach meant "use of a lot of synths and keys, not overshadowing the power of what we have, which is a four-piece rock and roll band." "Faani" swaps distortion for acoustic guitar and slide. "Zor-o-Zar" is the proggiest thing here, and Tırkış's clarinet colours the mournful, anthemic "Khwab Gah". The Middle Eastern colour was deliberate; when cello failed, Ahamed said, clarinet and tambur did the job.

The band name Pink Floyd as their biggest influence, with Radiohead in the mix too. What keeps Parvaaz from being a tribute act is language. "If it was in English, we'd be called wannabes," the band said. Where The Local Train set out to put the Hindi in indie, Parvaaz have spent sixteen years setting Urdu and Kashmiri poetry to psychedelic rock.

Kauaʻi ʻōʻō: the song at the centre

Track five is the album's emotional core. Ahamed and lyricist Syed Murad Gilani wrote it without a title, "chasing a feeling we couldn't quite name", until Ahamed remembered the bird: the 1987 recording of the last male calling for a mate who would never reply. Their song, they told Apple Music, "already felt like that, like a duet where the second voice never comes in—a conversation with silence."

The call is the real recording, by Thane Pratt, licensed from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The clip went viral in 2016, Homegrown noted, and the top comment beneath almost every upload read: "Someone should sample this." Parvaaz finally did, setting it beside what Rolling Stone India called a "flittering oud". Afshan Hussain Shaikh's video, a lone dancer moving through grief, makes the metaphor human.

Is Na Gul Na Gulistan worth the wait?

Yes, with a caveat the band would wear as a badge: this is not music built for 30-second clips. "Some songs have a hook, some songs don't have a hook at all," they said, and the promised hope mostly arrives in the final minutes. There are no Kashmiri songs this time, either. "It just didn't come," Ahamed said.

Rolling Stone India named it among the 25 best Indian albums and EPs of 2025: "Parvaaz have taken a look at the world around them and found little to celebrate, and that's the most important thing that a rock band can do in 2025." Rock Street Journal scored it 9.9.

Like Thaikkudam Bridge, Parvaaz built their audience on their own terms, in their own languages. "There will be people who want to give more time to understanding our music," they said, "and we will always cater to them." Give it 37 minutes, start to finish.

Stream it on Spotify or Apple Music, hear "Kauaʻi ʻōʻō" on Spotify's Rock in India playlist, and follow the band at parvaazmusic.com.

FAQ

When was Parvaaz's Na Gul Na Gulistan released?

On 5 December 2025, via AWAL. It is their third studio album, after Baran (2014) and Kun (2019).

What does Na Gul Na Gulistan mean?

It is Urdu for "Neither Flower Nor Garden".

What bird call is sampled in Parvaaz's Kauaʻi ʻōʻō?

The last known call of a male Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, an extinct Hawaiian bird, recorded by Thane Pratt in 1987 and licensed from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Who are the members of Parvaaz?

Khalid Ahamed (vocals), Bharath Kashyap (guitar), Fidel D'Souza (bass) and Sachin Banandur (drums). Co-founder Mir Kashif Iqbal left in 2021.

Sources

Cover: official Na Gul Na Gulistan album artwork, courtesy Parvaaz/AWAL, via Apple Music. Modified: placed on a blurred extension of the artwork and resized to 1200x630.