The engineer who became one of Pakistan's biggest singers

A computer scientist who never quite let go of music

The episode opens with Muzamil framing Abdul Hannan as one of the fastest-growing artists to come out of Pakistan — someone who has topped the Spotify charts more than once and is about to release a four-track EP. But what Muzamil keeps returning to is how ordinary Hannan seems off the back of it. Beyond the fame and the numbers, he comes across as the guy next door: simple, humble, in tune with himself.

That ordinariness has a source. Hannan was born in Karachi, moved to Lahore around class four, did his A levels at a college in Gulberg, and went on to study computer science at GIK Institute. Music was always there in the background, but so was tech. He says the two were tangled from the start. As a teenager messing with covers and digital audio workstations, he half-believed he’d become a developer who built VSTs and audio plugins — the science behind how a recorded signal gets manipulated, EQ’d, compressed. “I always had this shock about the science behind it,” he says. He never built the plugins. But the instinct to understand the machinery under the art never left him, and it shows up everywhere in this conversation.

What GIK actually teaches

GIK comes up the way it always does with its graduates — middle of nowhere, harsh, and somehow the thing they’d do all over again. Hannan is honest about why. “It’s not for the faint-hearted,” he says. The campus is isolated, the attrition is real — people leave, fail, land on double probation — and the batch that survives is small and welded together.

What that produces, in his telling, is work ethic and range. You’re running a student society, organising events, sitting quizzes, doing your degree, and in his case doing a little music on the side — all at once. “We used to say, throw anything at a GIK-ian and he’ll do it,” he tells Muzamil, “because he’s taken so much stress and seen so many things that by the end we’re at ease.” Just as important, it’s a place where rich and poor, Punjabi and Pakhtun, all share the same hostel room and the same standard. The ethnic politics that cluster people elsewhere eventually burst.

It’s a reframe that echoes through the music half of the episode: the value wasn’t the syllabus, it was the conditions. Hannan is blunt that he doesn’t fully endorse any university right now — the education system is archaic and discouraging, and computer science, a genuinely beautiful field, often gets taught badly enough to make students hate it. The degree, both he and Muzamil agree, is for fundamentals, attitude, and social skills. The actual craft you discover yourself. By third year he had decided he wanted front-end engineering, and started doing online certifications on the side regardless of what his courses were.

Why he still codes full-time

The detail that surprises people is that Hannan never quit engineering. He still works full-time, now as a front-end engineer for a company based out of Amsterdam, even with millions of monthly listeners. He recalls a colleague in Amsterdam pointing at another artist’s numbers and asking, in effect, why he was still sitting in an office. The honest answer is that he wants to be.

His first job out of university was at one of Pakistan’s biggest IT services companies, and he lasted three months. He describes watching toppers from FAST and LUMS stay in roles they knew were going nowhere out of pure fear — “do you even know what your potential is?” — and decided he didn’t want that fear to set in. He switched to a mature services startup using a modern stack, React and TypeScript, with real autonomy, and through a client there eventually arrived at the remote setup he has now, with a four-month stint in Berlin along the way.

By the end of the episode the job has become almost philosophical. Art, he says, is inherently chaotic — he might sit for six hours and write nothing, or write a whole song in thirty minutes. Engineering gives him structure and a sense of being grounded: for those hours he isn’t a musician, he’s an employee, an engineer doing logical work. And it buys him independence. “I can say no — even if I don’t get this project, I can still survive.” A full-time musician, he points out, ends up working on things he isn’t enthusiastic about. The job is what lets the music stay something he loves.

Releasing a song to nobody

The breakout story is almost anticlimactically simple, which is the point. During the pandemic — remote exams, then a remote job, a dull and depressing stretch where nothing felt real — Hannan needed somewhere to put the frustration. A close friend kept nudging him to release something. He overthought it badly and was, in his words, on the verge of not putting it out at all. “I didn’t really think it was good enough.”

He released it anyway, independently, through a distribution service — the kind, like DistroKid or CD Baby, that takes an independent artist’s WAV file and pushes it to Spotify and Apple Music for a cut of the streaming revenue. No music video. A rough cover art with his own photo that he later changed because it made him cringe. He convinced himself two or three hundred people would hear it at most.

It got fifteen thousand views. People were resharing it to their stories, influencers were reposting it. “Fifteen thousand was a huge deal when you expected two hundred.” That was the first spike. The next song did well too. The third, Bikhra, started shifting things — strangers making stories, calling him a new artist with a track that hit. Then Spotify launched in Pakistan, the charts arrived, and on one of the first or second charts he found himself at number one, with Bikhra above an established name. He says he didn’t support the “overthrown” framing the media ran with, but it pulled the press in, and the snowball started.

Notice what was absent: no curator put him on a playlist, no label discovered him. The funnel that didn’t exist in Pakistan before — independent distribution plus Spotify discovery — was the whole mechanism.

The first sold-out show, and the disbelief

The first proper ticketed concert was in Islamabad while he was still living in Berlin and his team was insisting the demand was real. He flew in, did a sound check, and left, certain nobody would come. It sold out — four to five hundred people, cars backed up, the area blocked. “Why did they come for me? I take myself so lightly.” Walking on stage to a crowd singing back lyrics he’d written in bed, expecting no one to ever hear them, he describes as an insane spike of euphoria he can’t define.

He’s deliberate about not letting that high become normal. Every day, he says, he gives himself a reminder to remember where he came from, a reality check against taking any of it for granted — because things go up and things come down, and you have to be ready for the down so you can come back up. He’s grateful to the people working backstage who never get seen. And the fear never fully leaves either: he says the higher you rise, the more pressure you carry, because you become too big to fail.

An industry broken at the fundamentals

This is where the engineer’s eye gets unsparing. Hannan is, by his own account, possibly the only artist who does his own sound check more diligently than the sound guy — six, eight hours on it sometimes — because Pakistan doesn’t really have proper front-of-house engineers, the people who manage a venue’s whole sound. Good sound is an art that changes with every room: the wall behind you, the bounce-back, the monitoring. It can’t be a saved setting you carry from place to place. He sees a real, uncompetitive opening there for anyone who learns it well enough to consult.

The problems compound from there. Most serious artists travel with a tech rider — a documented list of equipment and monitoring requirements, comprehensive PDFs globally. In Pakistan it’s treated as “nice to have” rather than binding, so things listed simply aren’t there at runtime while a paying crowd waits. And then there’s money: payments arriving eight months late, or contracts so routinely violated that he’s now treating them seriously, threatening legal action and willing to go to arbitration. “It’s not just about me. It’s an ecosystem we need to improve. Someone has to start.” His standing complaint is the national excuse — thora bohot to ho jata hai, a little slippage is fine — which he reads as complacency dressed up as tolerance.

His own fix is borrowed straight from engineering. He built his team around work ethic and right attitude, and runs it like product management: sprints, retros, a proper meeting a week or two after each event to draft processes for everything inside their control, down to how to handle the crush of people wanting photos.

Coldplay’s bicycles and Pakistan’s missing curation

The contrast Hannan keeps reaching for is curation. Pakistan, he and Muzamil agree, has almost no concept of experience design — bring the artist, put them on a mic, maybe a backdrop for a big event. He tells the story of a Coldplay concert in Berlin where he saw stationary bicycles set up in front of the stage. He guessed something eco-friendly; it turned out the audience pedalling turbines was literally helping power the show. “Where does that thinking even reach?” His point isn’t the gimmick — it’s that an industry which can’t take a tech rider or a contract seriously is nowhere near the second step of asking how to make a thing better.

He does see movement. A recent experiential, audio-visual concert he was part of — a large team of creatives and technical people, visuals made by someone in India — counts, to him, as a genuine step up. Muzamil pushes on scale: why a hundred small shows a year instead of one stadium of a hundred thousand. Hannan’s answer is grounded and a little deflating. The industry hasn’t mastered five hundred people yet — fights break out, and there’s no civic maturity yet for making thousands of women feel safe in a crowd. Master five hundred first. The economics are real too: a Pakistani artist can’t survive on one show a year the way Coldplay can, because for most artists below the millions-of-listeners tier, and for the session musicians who back them, live shows are the primary income.

AI, the human story, and a fear for 2050

On AI, Hannan refuses both the doom and the hype. He reasons from his own field: you can’t just ask AI to build a front-end, because it sits inside a whole architecture, and the developer’s originality and judgement are still required. Music is the same. A model can get close to an artist’s voice, but only if it’s trained on thousands of hours — Atif or Nusrat can be approximated because their catalogues are vast — and even then it misses the exact timbre and dynamics, and it’s still a bot that makes errors. The value, he and Muzamil land on, moves to the human in the middle: using AI as a toolkit for lyrics here, a melody there, then curating and assembling it. The intersectionality is where human thought lives.

Muzamil pushes the deeper point — that in an age where anyone can produce a good-sounding song, the moat becomes the human story. Artists abroad sell a connection, not just a craft; he admits he’s listened to every song by guests who’ve sat across from him precisely because he understood where the music came from. Hannan agrees but insists on balance: turn yourself into an influencer broadcasting everything and the value collapses; stay a total mystery, like he says the Weeknd largely does, and that can win too. He shares the thinking behind the EP — songs about identity crisis, calling out to someone to pull you out of the dark, losing close friends, and a one-minute closer called Khulasa that’s a summary of what life amounts to and how to make peace with it. But he’ll document the journey only when there’s a real reason to, an album he believes in, not at every show.

The conversation closes on the question Muzamil asks all his guests — where he sees Pakistan in 2050. Hannan doesn’t perform optimism. “It scares me,” he says. He talks about an inherent guilt at doing well while friends suffer and earn nothing, about complaints abroad over a two-minute-late train measured against what people at home are dealing with. His only honest prescription is the man in the mirror: individual reflection first, admitting the cultural faults nobody wants to admit, then letting any improvement propagate outward from there. Coming from someone who runs his own band like an engineering team and still won’t take a late payment as normal, it doesn’t read as a platitude. It reads as the same instinct that built everything else — fix the fundamentals, starting with yourself.