Ambika Nayak, known professionally as Kayan, is an Indian musician, singer and disc jockey.
Her stage name, Kayan, is derived from reversing her surname "Nayak":>. Additionally, she is also a part of the group Kimochi Youkai and the electronic music duo Nothing Anonymous with Nirmit Shah.[1][2] According to Nayak, her family was already musically inclined, with her mother being a Hindustani classical vocalist and her grandmother, a Kathak dancer, and she was thus able to get substantial exposure and training.[3]
By the end of 2021, she was reportedly one of the most streamed female indie artists on Spotify.[4][5]
In 2022, she released her seventh and eighth singles DFWM (abbreviation of Don't Fuck With Me) and No Shade, the latter of which featured Singaporean rapper Yung Raja.[6]
The magazine Man's World praised her live DJ sets as "passionately genre-agnostic, driven by feel and an inexplicable sixth-sense tied to her spectators", and claimed that they had been key to her overall musical popularity.[2]
Singles