“You could see the people were just going absolutely crazy. Absolutely crazy,” grinned Nucleya, recalling the sea of people dancing to his songs in Mumbai during the city’s biggest Ganpati procession. “Whichever road I put my eyes on, that entire road was filled with people. If you look up in the buildings also, all the balconies and everything was just absolutely full with people,” he adds, in a conversation with Billboard India.
Eleven years ago, Nucleya (Udyan Sagar) took his desi-inspired dance music to the streets – straight into a visarajan procession for Mumbai’s iconic Lalbaugcha Raja. Fresh from the release of his first album Koocha Monster, Nucleya was building on his arsenal of funky tracks with a distinctly Indian sound to them, and amassing a young fan-base. He launched his second album, Bass Rani, by playing the music on a moving truck as part of the procession in September 2015.
DJ Su Real opened for Nucleya, and DJ Mo City was at the event, vlogging everything on Snapchat. Rapper DIVINE who had collaborated on the song “Jungle Raja” with Nucleya also came on-stage to perform the song.
Speaking to Billboard India about the day, Nucleya said, “When this idea was thrown at me, I thought it matches with my style of music that I do also really well because I kind of celebrate the Indian-ness in my music a lot. I am very proud of the colours, the sound, the music, the culture, everything. So, I thought there can’t be a better way to celebrate this.”
But this conversation didn’t start on the streets, it started in Yuva Sena’s office. Tej Brar, who was a part of the entertainment and artist representation company Only Much Louder (OML) and Nucleya’s manager back then, remembered going to the office to ask for this collaboration. “At the end of the conversation he [the Yuva Sena in-charge] called the 15-20 excited boys who were hanging out outside the office and said, ‘y’all know who this Nucleya character is, should we do this?’ And they said, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s the coolest and we have to 100% do this.’”
From there, came the permissions, the setup, the security… “It was chaotic from day one. I remember that there were a lot of permissions that were involved and I remember there was a team that was set aside just to make sure that all the permissions are taken care of. Then we were supposed to prepare the vehicle on which we were supposed to do the small setup with the speaker and the lights and everything. Then we had a team who was just taking care of security because there’s just an unbelievable amount of people over there,” said Nucleya.
They also announced the album launch across all of Nucleya’s social media channels and invited people to show up. Brar remembers seeing the crowd shift to Nucleya fans, “We saw more and more ‘Koocha Monster’ t-shirts show up, we saw more and more of our ‘F**k That Shit’ t-shirts go up.” As the crowd expanded, it turned into a “massive party”, said Brar. “You had this really cool, interesting mix of folks who were Nucleya fans, but also folks who are Ganpati people who were there. And they had no clue what was going on but because they were mixing in with the hardcore Nucleya fans, and they saw that people were having so much fun, the whole thing just turned into a party.”
For Nucleya, what was also important was that it was a free event, and that people had the freedom to be themselves. “This is a street festival. There’s no dress code, there’s no ticket required. You can come as you want. You can dance till whatever time that you want to. And this kind of revolves around the festival that the whole of Maharashtra and probably beyond that people celebrate.”
When asked if he would like to do this again, his response was immediate. “Any day, any time, anywhere. Absolutely.”
Billboard India spoke with Nucleya in August. A few days later, he did the second such event – Nucleya was part of the Aagman (arrival) procession for Chinchpokli Cha Chintamani Ganpati in Mumbai on August 29, 2026. He subsequently released the track “Aala Re Aala” that he performed on the day.
