Barfi!

Released on 9 August 2012 by Sony Music India, the soundtrack to Anurag Basu’s Barfi! was composed almost entirely by Pritam and built around minimalist instrumentation, leaning on cello and violin rather than the layered, percussion-heavy arrangements common in Hindi film music of the period^[1]. Basu has cited the French film Amélie as a reference point for the score’s tone, and because the film’s central character is deaf and mute, comparatively few of its songs are performed as literal, lip-synced numbers on screen; the music instead narrates feeling that the story’s dialogue cannot.

Critics responded to the album with unusual enthusiasm for a Bollywood soundtrack. Hindustan Times gave it 4.5 out of 5 stars, praising Pritam for breaking from his usual sound, while Bollywood Hungama rated it 3.5 out of 5 and called it one of the composer’s best-quality work to date^[1]. That reputation has only grown with time: Film Companion later ranked it among the ten best Hindi film albums of the 2010s, and multiple retrospectives have named it one of the strongest Bollywood soundtracks of its decade.

The album's most quietly enduring track is “Phir Le Aya Dil,” a ghazal-styled ballad recorded in three separate versions by Rekha Bhardwaj, Arijit Singh, and Shafqat Amanat Ali, each rendering Sayeed Quadri’s lyrics of unresolved longing in a different emotional register^[1]. At the time of the film's release, Singh's version was a minor credit for a singer still a year away from his breakout with “Tum Hi Ho”; it has since become one of the tracks most closely associated with his early catalogue.