(From left to right) Shashwat Sachdev, Hanumankind, Jasmine Sandlas lead the first song from Bollywood film ‘Dhurandhar.’ Photos: Taya Dulaeva (Sachdev), Maitreya Shah (Hanumankind), Warner Music India (Sandlas)
On July 6, 2025, the first look for Bollywood’s latest flick Dhurandhar dropped, unveiling a star cast including Ranveer Singh, Sanjay Dutt, Akshaye Khanna, Arjun Rampal and R. Madhavan all in on the high-stakes action directed, written and produced by Aditya Dhar.
The slickly edited two-and-a-half-minute clip garnered eyeballs and still stands trending at #11 on YouTube, accruing over 37 million views in less than a week. It’s driven by music from composer-producer Shashwat Sachdev, who brought in hip-hop artist Hanumankind and Punjabi artist Jasmine Sandlas for an unnamed track.
Sachdev says of Hanumankind, “We showed him with a brief edit of the film teaser. He came in one night and did his words. He came very prepared, and he knew what he was doing. He went behind the mic, and he was ready for it.”
The song for Dhurandhar—which is yet to be released—marks Hanumankind’s second Bollywood project after being commissioned by Netflix for “Lola’s Chant” in 2022 for the Hindi film Looop Lapeta. This time, however, the stakes are higher considering it’s a much bigger film production and, of course, it’s coming after the global success the rapper has enjoyed with the songs “Big Dawgs” and “Run It Up.” In 2024, he also led the rap on “The Last Dance” with composer Sushin Shyam for the Malayalam film Aavesham. Hanumankind also made his acting debut in December 2024 with the Malayalam film Rifle Club, directed by Aashiq Abu.
“It’s always like a journey that you get started on and people like things, then people want to make it their own and have their own signature on it,” he says about collaborating with Hanumankind upon Dhar’s suggestion.
Dhurandhar also marks yet another collaboration with Sachdev and filmmaker Dhar after films like Uri: The Surgical Strike (which won both Sachdev and Dhar National Film Awards)and Article 370. Sachdev tells Rolling Stone India that he and Dhar have a “long-standing relationship” when it comes to creating music for film.
Sachdev began writing music for Dhurandhar soon after he read the script a year ago. Then, a few months ago, when he and Sandlas saw a rough edit of the first look video with Dhar’s assistant Ojas Gautam, it inspired them to add new layers. The composer says, “The version I made [of the song heard in the first look video] was me telling my story of how I see the world of this film. He [Dhar] has created a very special world in the film.”
As a result, the violent world of the period action film, packed with an ensemble cast raring to go at each other’s throats, gets a high-octane sonic reflection of the unforgiving vigilante-style fight scenes and provocative moves made behind the scenes by the film’s key characters.
For Sachdev, it was about going down “spirals” of ideas with Sandlas to create the first version of the song, which also features singer Sudhir Yaduvanshi. The goal was to “do justice to the vintage-ness or the heritage” of Dhurandhar. Sachdev says once the song was taking shape, Dhar suggested to contact Hanumankind. The composer was “already a fan” and points out that the decision to bring aboard Hanumankind wasn’t just on the basis of his recent hits. “I really love his work […] it was so refreshing when he came over, he was just so good,” Sachdev says.
Before the suggestion to bring in Hanumankind came in, Sachdev says they were “shooting in the dark” when it came to finding a voice that would match the grit and intensity of Dhurandhar. “We were trying to find that one original voice. He [Hanumankind] already had the groove and the direction when he came in.”
Experimenting with hip-hop in the soundtrack was also Sachdev’s way of expanding the genre’s boundaries. “I feel that hip-hop as a genre is so open and so welcoming that I personally feel that slowly, it has become a ‘God’ genre,” he points out. “It is that one genre that encompasses every other genre within itself. A religious song could be a hip-hop song. You could do hip-hop with cinematic orchestrals. You could do Indian classical music and hip-hop. As a genre, it is so welcoming of so much inventiveness and experimentation.” This is also exemplified by his recent collaborations with other hip-hop artists on soundtracks, such as King on “Cyclone” from Kesari: Chapter 2.
Dhurandhar has set a release date of Dec. 5, 2025. While more details about the song and the rest of the soundtrack are still awaited, Sachdev promises that this is a “palette breaker” compared to previous projects with Dhar. With editor Shivkumar Panicker, Dhar and Sachdev usually build the soundtrack along the way, right from the scriptwriting stage. “We are in the process, and we will write a lot of music, and we will like it for a while, and then we will love it and get obsessed with it. And sometimes, that will lose its way from the film, and we’ll have to let it go to get something else. That is the process we are going through right now,” the composer says.
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