Inside Gilithigreams, the girl group turning Arunachal into Pop’s next frontier

Arunachal Pradesh is one of the most culturally rich states in the country. It shares borders with China, Bhutan, and Myanmar. It has 26 major tribes and over a hundred dialects. Its people are deeply rooted, its landscapes are unlike anywhere else in India, and its young people are talented in ways that the rest of the country is only beginning to notice. Many of them carry those talents to Delhi, to Bangalore, to Mumbai. Some dream of Seoul. Most find that the world they want to reach does not come looking for them here.

Tarh Moyon decided not to wait for it.

"I used to watch K-pop and gave many online auditions," she says, "but I was never selected. After that, I thought, why can't we do something ourselves? If we can't go there, we can start from our own state."

That decision, to start from their own state on their own terms, is how Gilithigreams was born. The name is a compression of the phrase "girls with big dreams," syllables collapsed into a single word that didn't exist before they made it. Which, it turns out, is exactly how they built everything else, too.

Northeast India exists in the Indian imagination mostly as a postcard: the living root bridges of Meghalaya, the Hornbill Festival of Nagaland, a kind of exotic periphery that gets acknowledged around Republic Day and forgotten the rest of the year. Within that already-peripheral region, Arunachal Pradesh sits furthest from the centre. It is staggeringly beautiful and chronically underfunded. For a young person from the Northeast who wants to perform, the path has almost always run in one direction: outward. The opportunities, the studios, the industry attention, none of it comes here on its own.

Tarh Moyon, Weyo Lumi, Tap Pabe, and Nabam Sasum are all still there. They are also all still students, balancing college with what amounts to a full-time career: separate vocal sessions, separate dance practices, project meetings, live performances, and the logistical nightmare of making music without a label, a studio, or government support of any kind. "Everything. Music, dance studios, performances, we manage ourselves," Moyon says. "We earn from live performances and use that money to produce music and pay for dance studios."

Nobody handed them an infrastructure. They built one out of gig money, group chats, and the particular stubbornness that comes from having no other option. 

The group started in 2021, not as a pop act but as a dance crew. For two years, they competed in different dance events, and they lost. Repeatedly. Without winning a single title.

Two years of losing does specific things to a group's ambitions. The easy frame is perseverance, girls who kept going despite failure, and that is partly right. But more precisely, the losses radicalised them. If the existing structures wouldn't recognise them, they would build a structure that didn't require recognition.

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Moyon had been joking, half-seriously, about forming a pop group. Then she stopped joking. "After some time, she gathered everyone together and finally revealed the real reason behind creating the group," one member recalls. Her main goal was never simply fame. It was more specific and more lasting: preserving their culture, keeping their mother tongue alive through music, making sure that the languages spoken in their hills, Galo, Apatani, Nyishi and others, would exist somewhere beyond the homes and the hills that produced them.

When she laid it out seriously, the others admitted they had wanted the same thing and hadn't thought it was actually possible.

In December 2024, Gilithigreams officially debuted as a pop group with "Morom To", a song Moyon had written before the group even knew what they were doing. She chose the title first, then built the song around it; verse by verse, pre-chorus by chorus. When she brought it to the others, the initial reaction was doubt. Nobody expected it to become a hit. The views crept up slowly, and then kept creeping, and gradually they started believing in themselves more seriously. Two more releases followed: "Naso Soto," and a Hindi song "Tum Hi Ho", an unexpected choice that showed the group was not interested in limiting what they could be.

Their choreography is built the same way their decisions are made: collectively, across distance. The four members live in different places. When they need to create, they pick one location and converge. They listen to the beat together and talk through what moves might fit which parts of the song. Everyone contributes. Nobody's idea is discarded without being heard. It is, structurally, the opposite of how the music industry usually works, where decisions filter down from above. Here, everything runs sideways, through consensus.

What is striking about Gilithigreams, in person, is how little of the usual performance of ambition is present. They do not talk over each other to make their point. They laugh at themselves easily. When asked who is most likely to oversleep and miss soundcheck, every finger in the room points immediately at Moyon, who does not disagree. When asked who would most likely cry reading fans' comments, same result. She cries easily, the others explain, with the warmth of people describing someone they genuinely love. Moyon accepts this cheerfully. There is no hunger in the room that has curdled into ego. They seem, for all the ambition they carry, to be having a good time.

"We all come from backgrounds where there were money problems and limited support," Moyon says, speaking about what she ultimately wants for her bandmates. "I want everyone to grow, earn and perform on global stages."

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The language question is more complicated and more interesting than it might first appear.

All four members are from the Nyishi community, but they come from different areas, which means their dialects and pronunciations differ in subtle ways. They have navigated this without drama. What is more striking is the larger linguistic landscape they are working within: English for the industry, Hindi for the national audience they want to reach, their mother tongue for the songs that mean the most to them.

They are not, they are careful to say, abandoning any of them. They want to be Indian artists who are also, specifically, from Arunachal Pradesh. Not one or the other.

This matters more than it might seem. The history of regional music in India is largely a history of choices made under pressure. Go national or stay local, assimilate or remain niche. Gilithigreams is trying to refuse that binary, to insist that specificity and reach are not mutually exclusive. Whether they succeed is an open question. That they're asking it, loudly and in public, is already worth paying attention to.

In Guwahati for a promotional appearance tied to HYBE's first-ever India auditions, the company behind BTS, Seventeen, Le Sserafim, TXT, the group moves through the day with the particular combination of tiredness and alertness that comes from landing in a city that morning and immediately beginning to work. The heat, they note, is different from home. Guwahati runs warmer. They adjust.

For Pabe, HYBE's choice to hold auditions in Guwahati means more than logistics. "Northeast people have talent, but they don't always get visibility and exposure. A company like HYBE choosing Guwahati shows that they are finally paying attention to this region. It's not just an opportunity, it's recognition for the Northeast, for our culture and our sound, that we are also capable of performing on the global stage."

The auditions represent an opening the group never had access to when they were starting out. Lumi is direct about it: "If we had gotten the opportunity, we would have definitely gone. But when we started, opportunities like this didn't exist for us. That's why we are independent now."

On whether Gilithigreams might have been different under a label like HYBE, Moyon thinks for a moment before saying: "If we had been under a label, maybe we wouldn't have had the same freedom we have now. Right now, we can express our creativity independently."

Sasum's message to girls from the Northeast who want to audition is straightforward: "Come out. Show whatever talent you have and be confident. Most importantly, be yourself. Even if you are not selected, do it anyway because every experience teaches you something."

At one point during the day, with K-pop as the theme of the event, the group breaks into "Golden" by K-pop Demon Hunters, right there in a hallway, no stage, no cue. Four girls from the far Northeast, singing K-pop in Guwahati because the moment called for it and because they could.

Performing publicly in a region that had no framework for what they were doing meant navigating a particular kind of dissonance. At a Holi performance in their early career, some boys backstage, not recognising the group, called them "local Blackpink" and "Flipkart Blackpink," assuming they were backup dancers. The members found it funny, more than hurtful. They understood, they say, that those people were simply unfamiliar with this kind of performance culture. And then Gilithigreams walked on stage, and the reactions changed.

They also read their comments, all of them, including the negative ones. They had prepared themselves for criticism before debuting, knowing that what they were doing was genuinely new in Arunachal Pradesh, knowing that people would compare pop songs to folk songs without understanding that these are different things. The criticism came. They stayed.

"Many people still compare pop songs with folk songs without understanding the difference between the two genres," one member says. "But we believe people will gradually understand our style over time."

Sasum joined the group after Moyon spotted her on a film set in Arunachal. She was a street dancer, a b-girl who had been doing breaking before she was anything else. She has the self-possession of someone who has already performed in physical spaces where there was no margin for hesitation. You either committed to the move or you fell.

Pabe talks about what it was like to finally feel seen. "Sometimes I really do feel like a celebrity when people ask to take pictures with us." She says it with a kind of pleasure that hasn't yet curdled into expectation. The delight of recognition that still surprises.

Lumi, described by the others as soft and elegant, loves animals and, apparently, food. She is also, one member insists, a genuinely beautiful vocalist who hasn't yet reached her ceiling.

Moyon, who writes songs title-first and builds outward, who turned private rejection into collective action, is the one the others would nominate for HYBE, though she seems entirely uninterested in that framing. She is more interested in what the whole group becomes. She talks about global stages not as an ego project but as proof: proof that someone from the Northeast can make music that the world wants to hear.

The HYBE auditions in Guwahati on May 3rd drew a crowd that the Northeast had not seen gather for an audition call before. Whether anyone from the region gets selected is still an open question. Results take time. But Gilithigreams had already done what they came to do: they showed up, performed in front of a city that was paying attention, and put a face on what a Northeast girl group can look like in 2025.

Four songs: two originals, two covers. After it was over, they were tired and relieved. "The audience was very supportive," one of them said. That much was visible.

Sasum has a specific image from childhood that keeps her going: Taylor Swift on a massive international stage. She wants that for herself and for Gilithigreams. She wants to perform at Coachella. It is not a vague dream. It is a destination she has named.

"We want to be recognised by the whole world, globally," Lumi says. "We want Gilithigreams to show up on the global stage. Right now, we have only started with Delhi and Guwahati. We want to go beyond the Northeast, beyond India."

The girls from Arunachal Pradesh, sometimes called simply the "Morom To girls" by fans who still stumble over "Gilithigreams," have been back home since their performance. They are in college. They are in practice. They are working on new music. "Keep watching," they told their fans at the end of the Guwahati event. "Something big is coming."

They meant it.

Gilithigreams (Tarh Moyon, Weyo Lumi, Tap Pabe, Nabam Sasum) are based in Arunachal Pradesh and are currently independent. Their releases "Morom To," "Naso Soto," and "Tum Hi Ho" are available on streaming platforms.

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