The Yellow Diary on their 10-year journey, indie music’s evolution and taking their biggest India tour yet | Interview

The Yellow Diary is ready to hit the road again and this time, they're bringing their biggest India tour yet.

Ten years, multiple releases, countless rehearsals and a lot of songs later, The Yellow Diary are still figuring things out. And that may be exactly what has kept the band going. What started in 2015 as a group of musicians jamming together has grown into one of India’s most familiar independent music acts. Over the years, Rajan Batra, Himonshu Parikh, Harshvardhan Gadhvi, Sahil Shah and Stuart DaCosta have built a sound that refuses to stay in one box, while their audiences have grown from a few familiar faces in Mumbai to packed rooms across the country.

The Yellow Diary are 10, but they’re still figuring things out — and that’s the point.

Now, the band is taking that journey on the road with its biggest India tour yet. The tour comes in support of their debut album, In Case We Forget, released in November 2025. The nine-track album features collaborations with Lisa Mishra and Shilpa Rao and brings together the band's familiar emotional storytelling with a sound that reflects where they are today.

When indie music stopped being a small corner

The Yellow Diary came together when independent music in India was still often clubbed under the “alternative” label. The scene was smaller, the opportunities fewer and the gap between indie and mainstream was much more obvious.

“I think when we started jamming, we were still considered an alternative music platform as a whole,” the band tells Hindustan Times. A decade later, the industry has changed rapidly. Independent music has become a much larger ecosystem, with artists moving freely between genres and finding space in films, Bollywood, television and mainstream pop culture. “That’s the bridge that we kind of really crossed during this time,” they explain.

That takes them back to their early rehearsal space, which inspires a little nostalgia — followed almost immediately by panic about what they have just said. It is a small moment, but it says plenty about their journey. The band can now laugh at the spaces, struggles and compromises of its early years because those years are firmly behind them.

Mumbai started it. India became home.

For The Yellow Diary, one of the biggest changes has been seeing audiences outside Mumbai grow alongside them. Asked which crowd surprised them most during the In Case We Forgot touring cycle, Rajan immediately picks Melbourne.

“We were not really expecting anything, and when we went there, it felt like we were playing to a home ground,” he says.

But if one city remains emotionally special, it is Mumbai. “On a more sentimental sense, I feel like Mumbai was the first city that ever gave us the opportunity to perform. So it will always feel like home no matter where we come from,” the band says.

There was a time when Mumbai was also the one place where they could count on a crowd: “Back in the day, Bombay was one of the only cities where we felt like we would perform and people would turn up and it would be like a crazy gig because it was our home turf,” they recall. “But over the years now every city has really started showing up.”

That is perhaps the biggest compliment a touring band can receive. Mumbai may have started the story, but it no longer owns it. “We feel like we found a TYD family across the country.”

The biggest tour, with a little bit of everything

The upcoming In Case We Forget India Tour is the band's biggest yet, taking them across 15 cities and bringing together a decade's worth of music.

For the first time, all nine songs from In Case We Forget will be performed as part of the same live set. They will sit alongside songs that fans have followed for years, including Marz, Buniyaad, Roz Roz, Kahe Kahe, Rab Raakha and Mujhe Mere Naam Se.

But don't expect a simple album playback on stage. “A lot of new songs in the set,” they tease. “We always try and create a very new, fresh energy every time we go onto our [tour].”

The itinerary includes Bengaluru, Gurgaon, Jaipur, Indore, Bhopal, Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata, Chandigarh and Dehradun, among other cities.

For a band that has spent years touring, keeping things fresh has become almost as important as the songs themselves. The idea is not to recreate the album note-for-note, but to make the live version its own experience.

Ten years later, the story is still being written

There is a certain irony in a band called The Yellow Diary constantly talking about what it remembers. Old songs, forgotten studio sessions, early gigs, changing audiences and the versions of themselves they have left behind all keep finding their way into the conversation.

In Case We Forget brings together where The Yellow Diary are today, while the live shows bring the rest of the journey with them. [Full interview to be out soon on YouTube.]