Biography

Swet Shop Boys is an underground hip-hop duo founded in early 2014 by transatlantic South Asian diaspora artists Himanshu Suri better known as Heems from New York City, and Riz Ahmed known as Riz MC from London. Both also have rather relatively little-known heritage connected to the sheer-tragedy of the Partition of British India, with Heems' Indian-immigrant family of Hindu-Punjabi ethnicity tracing their origins to where is now sovereign country of Pakistan, and Riz MC's Pakistani-immigrant family of Muslim ethnicity tracing their origins to where the North zone of now sovereign India is. The conversation for forming a permanent-collaboration started out when both developed friendship after the latter needed a homely-place to stay in NYC, preparing months for his role in then under-preproduction TV miniseries, The Night Of (2016) for HBO®, coincidentally also an adaptation of also British limited-series, Criminal Justice (2008) for BBC® one. Their history dates back to when Heems reached out to Riz MC via Twitter®, and the rest is history. Their original EP album, almost named after the band, 'Swet Shop', was non-commercially released in 2014 via Heems' self-owned indie hip-hop label, Greedhead Music. Then, as foreshadowed since 2013, Heems unfortunately had to shutter his own label by 2015 due to financial-crunches with Heems tweeting that the blame goes to his friends who left him in heavy-debt by enjoying a free-ride out of the label's operations. Therefore, the band went on to establish their own indie label, Customs, by 2016. Moreover, Riz MC brought his long-time friend and record-producer with great-interest in Eastern music genres, Tom Calvert, as a third permanent-member - thereby expanding the band size from 2 to 3 members. Interestingly, the record-producer, full-name Thomas 'Tom' [Richard] Calvert, also has a bit interesting backstory about immigration as, while widely-known as "London-based producer", he actually spent his adolescence as an expat[riate] in West Coast of the US, before moving back to the UK. Together, the newly-reconstituted band released their LP album, 'Cashmere' in 2016 to great acclaim. The band's latest release is another EP, 'Sufi La' the very next year, 2017. They made their TV performance-debut in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015) and, have a brief-cameo appearance in Charli XCX's music video for her single "Boys", which she co-directed herself the very same year. The band has toured many Occidental metropolises since late 2014.
- IMDb mini biography by: Amateur biographer of a voracious researcher in "Maaz Kaleem aka Aazam"