Jhahnaa Transforms Love Into Color on Love & Alchemy

Mumbai-based singer-songwriter Jhahnaa approaches love as something far more complicated than romance on her album Love & Alchemy. Across seven tracks, she explores attraction, vulnerability, heartbreak, destruction, healing, and the strange ways love can reshape a person.

The album opens with “Drunk,” a brighter introduction built around the magic and happiness of falling for someone, before “Love Again” exposes the anxiety underneath it. From there, Jhahnaa pushes deeper into the emotional instability of connection. “Crawling Out” captures the feeling of finding light in another person only for that same intensity to become consuming, while “The Knife” takes the record into darker alternative territory, using pain as something almost physical.

That contrast is what gives Love & Alchemy its identity. “Blow A Kiss” examines the push and pull of romance without pretending love comes with a clean happily-ever-after ending. “Bridges” turns toward post-breakup yearning and the realization that ambition can feel hollow without someone beside you, while “Gone Away, Here Now” closes the album by shifting the focus toward the grounding love found in family and close friendships.

Jhahnaa’s synesthesia plays a major role in how the project is imagined, with individual songs connected to colors ranging from violet and powder blue to blood red, lavender pink, and brown. The record’s chemistry-inspired visual world extends that concept even further, merging dark academia aesthetics with Jhahnaa’s longtime fascination with science.

Produced by Azamaan Hoyvoy and mastered by Ashyar Balsara, Love & Alchemy works best as a complete emotional cycle. Rather than presenting love as safe or predictable, Jhahnaa treats it like an experiment: volatile, transformative, and worth surrendering to anyway.

You experience music through synesthesia, with each song on Love & Alchemy carrying its own colors. How early in the writing process do those colors appear, and how much do they influence the sound and production of a track?

The colors appear to me as I start writing and composing. These colors often turn into imagery that forms the skeleton of a production idea. For example, track 7, ‘Gone Away, Here Now’ was very brown and earthy to me, and earth is home.

The imagery I gave to my producer was that of an indie movie scene where a girl comes back to her homeland from abroad and is unpacking her bags. She is walking around her hometown with her headphones on. My producer then used his own creative ability to transform this imagery into music.

The album moves from the excitement of falling in love into fear, destruction, heartbreak, and eventually the grounding love of family and friends. Did you intentionally sequence the record as an emotional journey?

Absolutely. The ordering of the songs was super intentional. What feels bright on the surface can sometimes have a deep well of irrationality beneath. Although irrationality is inescapable in love, you need to protect yourself when the dynamics turn toxic. The yearning and hope exist for a while, but it’s important to have your feet on the ground and get a reality check. The songs were sequenced as chapters to a story. Writing this story took me by surprise that love has so many layers and lessons. A common thread that ties everything together is that there is creation happening through destruction. 

“The Knife” noticeably steps outside the album’s broader pop aesthetic and taps into your early Evanescence influence. What made this particular song demand a darker and heavier musical approach?

Lyrically, ‘The Knife’ carried a lot of dark energy that had to be channeled sonically through power chords. I talk about the sacred banyan tree being a witness, the animalistic hunger for love, and surrendering to death. These are very dark symbolisms that call for an alternative approach. 

The idea of “alchemy” runs deeper than the album title, especially in the way you describe transforming emotional pain into something tangible and creative. Has songwriting always been a form of emotional transformation for you?

Songwriting has given me a means to discover myself as I watch my feelings turn into physical form. I’ve struggled a lot with my personality all my life. My interests are far too many and contrasting for me to identify myself as one clear thing. Writing has made me gather these fragmented parts of myself and find a sense of stability. Especially with this album, I’m learning how to hold opposing elements together. 

As the composer, stylist, art director, and designer behind your work, Love & Alchemy exists as much visually as it does musically. How did you build the album’s dark-academia world, and what did you want the visuals to reveal that the songs alone couldn’t?

Chemistry was my favorite subject when I was in school. I wanted to channel as much of my personality as I could through the visuals. There’s subtlety yet strength in the white liner around my eyes. There’s a greenish tone to the album artwork, which is significant of the renewal that alchemy carries. The title is intentionally in goth lettering typography because of the darker side to the music…In my school of love and alchemy, we learn how to transmute pain into something beautiful.