Singer Dhee returns with Vari Vari, a single composed by Santhosh Narayanan with lyrics by Vivek that arrives as her first release on Viswa Records. The US-based label was co-founded earlier this year by Grammy-nominated songwriter Savan Kotecha in partnership with Republic Records.
“This song is about someone or something that has left us and is no longer here; it is about a lost feeling,” Dhee says of the track. “The entire song is an attempt to rediscover that feeling, to search for the part of yourself that you may have lost along the way.”
The arrangement opens on Tamil folk textures, continuous claps and resonant guitar lines, and then folds into a refrain that reads as both a romantic call and something quieter. Vari Vari translates loosely as come here or come with me, and the song treats it as an invitation that stretches beyond romance, toward whoever lives on in someone’s interior life. Her phrasing here is unhurried, the kind that pulls listeners into a chorus that feels expansive without raising its volume.
Dhee was born in Colombo and raised in Sydney, and her name is now bound up with a particular strand of Tamil pop that travels well outside Tamil Nadu. Rowdy Baby, the Maari 2 song she fronted in 2018, crossed 1.5 billion views on YouTube and remains the most-watched Tamil music video on the platform. Enjoy Enjaami, her 2021 release with Santhosh Narayanan, did the cultural lift differently, planting roots music inside the global streaming conversation.
The release sits inside an unusually full international stretch. Ancient Seed, her collaboration with producer WondaGurl and Diva Savage, came out earlier this year. Don’t Look Down put her on a track with Ed Sheeran. She is also one of the faces of H&M’s Red Stage campaign alongside GIVĒON and Absolutely, where she rewrote Like I Want You with Indian musical elements layered into the production.
The Viswa Records signing matters because it places Dhee inside an infrastructure built specifically for diaspora artists trying to operate at international scale, with Republic as distribution partner. Vari Vari is the first release under that deal.