Bassist and producer Hashbass—aka Harshit Misra—is a “self-confessed eighties-aesthetic geek”. The artist who was born in 1990, just a few months after his favourite decade, calls his new electronic music EP Solo At Your Party a sonic “exploration of the era of video-game arcades, rollerblades and neon lights seen through a 2023 lens”. Like many of his contemporaries, Misra was introduced to the sounds of the eighties through his parents. After a childhood in New Delhi, he moved to the US aged 20 and realised that the sort of music produced during that decade was exactly the kind of music he wanted to make and, going further, to update. “I walked out of LAX, sat in a cab and ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash was playing,” he recalls. “It hit me—this is the music I’ve always been listening to and this is the music that I want to do.” His love for the sound and its “shimmery, carefree, neon vibe” deepened while studying at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood. There he was inspired by producers and composers who were either from or hugely influenced by the eighties, such as Rick Rubin and Pharrell Williams. Solo At Your Party attempts to recreate that vibe, with a title that’s a nod to his awkwardness at social gatherings. “I don’t know how to party,” he says. “I’ve always been the guy in the corner who will have a couple of beers and then just be like, ‘Okay, bye guys.’ [But] these are songs that should be playing at a party where I don’t want people to know that they are my songs until they know that I’m in the room. I find that’s a bigger flex.” Hashbass, who can now boast one of 2023’s grooviest dance EPs, credits mixing engineer Ranbeer Sidhu for enabling him to execute all his ideas. Here, he takes Apple Music through the making of each of the six tracks on Solo At Your Party. “I Need U 2 Listn” “I wrote this at a time when I had this rage-against-the-world machine in me—where I just wanted people to listen to my music. So I was like, ‘If I put out a body of work, let the first song be called “I need you to listen”.’ It’s two different parts in the same song [that] goes into an arpeggiator thing, which I programmed through my Moog that I got a year before [I recorded the track]. I was like, ‘Maybe it’s time now to step up the game and use it and go crazy.’ So the second half is very 808-driven, very clubby. You know when you come out of a club, you can hear the thump of the bass? The second part of ‘I Need U 2 Listn’ is just [as] thump-y. I was doing a soundcheck where I played it, and I came out of the place and it was thumping. I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve achieved what I wanted.’” “Gave You My Love” “I was going through a phase in my life where, I won’t say that there was a break-up but I wanted to write a song where it depicted how you love somebody but that love is incomplete but still complete. I wanted it to be very hypnotic and very airy. But groove-wise, I wanted it to be very tight. I wanted to do a Parliament–Funkadelic-ish sound [that made me want to] go back to a discotheque in the eighties. It’s a very vibey song.” “Fallin Fallin’” “I have a huge love of Brazilian music like salsa, samba, cha cha cha, bachata and all that. I am [also] heavily intrigued by congas. I just love that instrument. I was in Delhi during the pandemic and I happened to stumble upon these congas in a music store. I remember taking the congas into an isolated room and playing a rhythm, which is on ‘Fallin Fallin’’. I stretched it and made it into a tempo. The epicentre of the song is mostly me trying to figure out rhythmically if I could incorporate one of my favourite instruments.” “Airplane Mode” “I wanted to write just a straight-ahead, funky disco tune. I had no other intent. I stumbled on a vocal chop that says, ‘You can put me on airplane mode but you’re still going to think about me.’ I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s so melancholic.’ People don’t know that I don’t know how to play the guitar properly. So I wrote some of the guitar parts, and some are sampled and chopped to what I heard in my head. This is a sample-heavy album. I love sampling. I love making something out of nothing.” “Nxo Worries” “It was the peak of the pandemic and I just came out of catching Covid. And I wanted to write a song which I could play if I’m driving down the coast. I wanted to make people feel a lot of freedom when they listen to this music. I remember playing this to my then girlfriend, now wife, and she heard it and was like, ‘Oh this [sounds] just so easy.’ That’s what made me name it ‘Nxo Worries’ with an ‘xo’. It was also like showing love.” “Everybody” “The EP was written in 2020. I had come back from Bangalore—where I had been stuck for six, seven months—and wanted to write something new. And I remember the night before, I was listening to a bunch of eighties stuff. The next morning I found this drum loop and that was the first time I did not pick up my electric bass. [Instead] I actually programmed the bassline on the synth bass because that’s also something I play and love. I wrote this bassline and I stopped for 10 minutes. I made that face that musicians make and was like, ‘This is gold.’ That became ‘Everybody’—I named it ‘Everybody’ because at some point in time, the world would open and I could play the song anywhere.”