I was just trying to pick up on what they were doing!” he laughed. Yasmine and Nathan regularly practice martial arts. “He’s obviously teaching us some martial arts here. What was going on there? “This guy is Nathan, Krewella’s manager on the road,” explained Ali Hamza, while in the middle of finishing one of the episodes for broadcast. Going through some of the behind-the-scenes photos, I noticed one in which Yasmine, Ali Hamza and one other person are standing with their legs wide apart in a position that reminded me of Taekwondo classes at school from back in the day. He’s almost a 60-year-old man and he had amazing energy, he was like a kid in a candy store.” “He was on set with us one day for 12 hours. How did he feel being on set? “He loved it,” responded Jahan. The duo has made no secret of the fact that their father, Sohail Yousaf, is a massive fan of the show. “Yeah, he would pop in and help out a little bit,” added Yasmine. “And our Abbu was our translator,” chimes in older sister Jahan. One of Jahan’s tattoos is the crescent and star insignia “There were a couple of communication barriers, but then we sort of started miming things out with Riaz and his son.” “We understand a little bit,” says Yasmine. Then I found out that the girls aren’t entirely fluent in Urdu. “We had a little bit of a crash course in Riaz’s career,” she laughs. “It was really cool because before we actually went into film and record with Riaz Bhai, we were in the dressing room - for hours - getting ready to set up and he was just singing us songs,” relates Yasmine. Interestingly, until the day they recorded the song, the duo wasn’t familiar with Riaz Qadri and Ghulam Ali Qadri’s work. While in parts, CS’s version of ‘Runaway’ is quite pleasing to listen to, to me it doesn’t sound like a fusion track. The Krewella sections of the song are wonderful as are the sections sung by the Qadri duo, they just don’t merge as well together. The collaboration with folk artists Riaz Qadri and Ghulam Ali Qadri, not so much. It’s a very short, but very sweet East-meets-West interpretation of the song. The opening riffs on the sarangi by Gul Mohammad gives the introduction a beautiful, but slightly melancholic touch. And they completely overhauled it as if they’re creating a new song and I kind of liked that.”Įxchanging high-fives with Ghulam Ali Qadri after recording their song together “It was interesting to create the song on our own, with our producer, and then have someone create a new version of the song,” says Jahan. They talk to Icon about their performance in Coke Studio and getting in touch with their father’s roots Sisters Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf are world-famous as an American-Pakistani electronic dance music band. In their debut performance on CS this year, they decided to perform a stripped-down version of ‘Runaway’. This year, along with ‘Bad Liar’ they released ‘Runaway’ from their much-awaited EP New World Part 2.
Among their many accomplishments is an International Dance Music Award in 2012 for ‘Best Breakthrough Artist, Group’.
Their debut album, Get Wet, was in the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 200 list in its first week of release. Krewella burst on to the American - and international - music scene almost 11 years ago and took the electronic dance music (EDM) world by storm.
There’s something very endearing about the girls - despite being around in the international music scene for over a decade and being quite successful - they come across as refreshingly free of any pretense. It was 9am in Eastern United States and 9pm in Pakistan. She, along with her sister Yasmine (and the other half of Krewella) are sitting on the breakfast table, coffee mugs in hand, sunlight streaming on to their fresh faces, devoid of any make-up. “I have to say, the re-imagination of Runaway was completely on Zoheb and Ali Hamza,” says Jahan Yousaf from the American-Pakistani band Krewella, during our little conversation over Skype about their recent performance in Coke Studio (CS).