Los Angeles-based vocalist, composer, and producer Sharada Shashidhar returns with her new album A Foot on the Ground, arriving June 2026 via Colorfield Records. Following the critical success of her 2024 debut Soft Echoes, the new record expands her distinctive blend of spiritual jazz, experimental production, and beat-driven composition into deeper and more exploratory territory.
Rooted in both jazz and Indian classical traditions, Shashidhar’s voice moves fluidly between discipline and improvisation, shaping a sonic language defined by elaborate harmonies, vocal layering, and emotional depth. Her work continues to challenge the boundaries of contemporary jazz by merging instinctive performance with carefully constructed production.
Over the past several years, she has become a key figure in Los Angeles’ experimental jazz community, performing internationally at venues and festivals including Le Guess Who?, Badehaus Berlin, Public Records, Solar Myth, and Zebulon. Her collaborative history spans a wide creative spectrum, including work with Nightmares on Wax, Carlos Niño, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, and Zeroh.
Her 2024 album Soft Echoes, released on Leaving Records, marked a defining moment in her artistic evolution as a bandleader. The project received widespread critical acclaim from outlets including Bandcamp Daily, The Guardian, and Mojo Magazine, and was named one of the Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2024 by Gilles Peterson and Worldwide FM.
With A Foot on the Ground, Shashidhar enters a new phase of artistic risk and discovery. Recorded over two years at Lucy’s Meat Market in Los Angeles, the album was shaped through an open-ended, collaborative process with producer Pete Min, encouraging spontaneity, imperfection, and instinct over refinement or pre-planning.
Rather than following a fixed structure, the sessions prioritized presence and experimentation. Shashidhar explored new instruments, tools, and compositional approaches, often embracing unexpected or imperfect takes as essential parts of the creative process. The result is an album that feels sculptural in nature—assembled through intuition, layered memory, and emotional honesty.
The record features contributions from a wide circle of collaborators, including Caleb Buchanan, Timothy Angulo, Devin Daniels, pianist Mark Bock, and drummer Mark Guiliana. Together, they helped shape a body of work that resists singular interpretation, instead unfolding as a collective and evolving musical conversation.
Across its sonic landscape, A Foot on the Ground moves through shifting moods and styles—not to demonstrate range, but to resist the flattening of identity into a single expression. Shashidhar describes the work as “a documentation of instinct,” an effort to release preconceived expectations and allow music to form in real time.
The album’s upcoming release has been previewed through a series of singles that trace its emotional and conceptual arc:
“Arches,” arriving April 1 alongside the album announcement, emerged from spontaneous lyric writing layered over pre-existing harmonic material. “With Myself,” released April 22, was born from a moment of vocal vulnerability and restraint, later elevated by a string arrangement. “Reassurance,” arriving May 13, grew from a vocoder-driven loop developed with Pete Min and refined through collaborative layering, including contributions from Mark Guiliana’s drumming.
Ultimately, A Foot on the Ground is designed as an immersive listening experience—one that invites repetition and rediscovery. Shashidhar hopes listeners will find familiarity within its complexity, describing the album as something that should feel both challenging and comforting at once, revealing new details with each listen.
With this release, Sharada Shashidhar continues to redefine contemporary spiritual jazz on her own terms, balancing freedom and structure, vulnerability and control, intuition and craft.
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