When Chai Met Toast

A name settled in the minutes before the first gig

When Chai Met Toast came together in Kochi in 2016, out of Kerala's small circuit of playing musicians, and chose their name immediately before their first performance. The line-up has not changed since: Ashwin Gopakumar sings, Achyuth Jaigopal plays guitar and banjo, Palee Francis handles keyboards and production, and Pai Sailesh plays drums and percussion. They surfaced in a year when several multilingual independent acts were beginning to get heard in a country whose popular music had long run through film soundtracks and playback singers.

They write in English and Hindi, with Tamil and Malayalam appearing where a tune calls for it. The band's own account of how that works is that the melody dictates the language rather than the other way round. The first EP, Joy of Little Things, arrived in 2017; Believe followed in 2018, the same year they wrote music for Kenny Sebastian's web series Die Trying. Work on the Indian festival circuit followed — Bacardi NH7 Weekender, SulaFest, the OnePlus Music Festival, Red Bull Tour Bus — and Spotify placed them in its RADAR programme for emerging artists.

The records, and the route out of India

When We Feel Young, released in 2021, is a seven-track multilingual set and remains their only full-length album. Around it sit the songs that did most of the groundwork: Kahaani in 2020, reworked as a duet in 2021, and Break Free, which made VH1 India's fifty most-played videos in 2021. Their music was used in the trailer for Jee Le Zaraa in August 2021, and later turned up in the films Friday Night Plan in 2023 and Do Aur Do Pyaar in 2024.

The touring built outwards. They played Expo 2020 Dubai and the Singapore Formula One Grand Prix in 2022, and sold out runs in the UK and Ireland in 2022 and 2023, taking in The Garage in London and King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow. The third EP, Love You The Same, came out of a month-long UK session in 2022 with producer Richard Wilkinson and was released in 2023. Speaking before a show at Birmingham's O2 Academy3 in May 2023, Gopakumar put the London sell-out against where they had started seven years earlier, saying they had only dreamed of filling international venues like it. Khoj (Passing By) was by then the song the room sang back at them, and it has stayed in the set ever since.

Eighteen months, a chenda, and nobody in the producer's chair

Dreamland, released on 20 August 2025, opened the campaign for the second album, Small Town, Big Love, Little Homes. The track moves between Malayalam, Hindi and English and marked the first time the band put Kerala percussion into their own productions — chenda, kombu and elathalam — alongside chimta and longhorn. The Malayalam verses were written by the lyricist Engandiyoor Chandrasekharan and sung by Job Kurian; Anto Phillip directed the video.

The record took roughly eighteen months and several passes. Having used an outside producer on the previous EP, the band recorded this one themselves. The string palette widened to banjo, mandolin, octave mandolin and charango. Titles named in advance of release include I'm Coming Home, Letter to Anja, Far From Bombay and Baaton. Gopakumar has described the writing as a full circle: the first EP was about home, and almost ten years on they were writing about home again.

The unusual part is that the album as a whole had still not been issued by late October 2026, while the band were playing all of it on stage nightly. They flagged that arrangement from the outset, saying when the tour was announced that not every song would be out by the time they reached Indian cities but that they would perform the album in its entirety regardless.

Where they stand in October 2026

The run was announced on 11 September 2025 as the Joy of Little Things World Trip, with a mailing-list presale that day and general sale from 12 September. The Indian leg opened in Kochi on 14 December 2025 and continued through Bengaluru, Mumbai and Pune on 19, 20 and 21 December, then Chennai on 9 January 2026 and Gurugram on 10 January. The band framed it around their tenth anniversary and around a decision to tour less often: these would be the only shows in each region for the following ten to twelve months.

Europe and the UK came first in 2026 — The Garage in London on 14 August, The Deaf Institute in Manchester on 15 August, Amsterdam on 22 August — followed by twelve North American dates in September, among them Club Dada in Dallas on 12 September, the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on 16 September, Fremont Abbey Arts Center in Seattle on 18 September, the Opera House in Toronto on 25 September, The Sinclair in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 27 September and Bowery Ballroom in New York on 2 October. A Los Angeles date on 15 September was cancelled. San Francisco's 650-capacity room sold out; Toronto drew close to 900.

Three dates remain on sale: The Ed Castle Hotel in Adelaide on 31 October, Oxford Art Factory in Sydney's Darlinghurst on 1 November, and the New Covent Garden Theatre in Dubai on 14 November, which closes the tour. Mumbai and New Delhi shows have been announced for afterwards. Speaking in early October 2026, Jaigopal described the operation as still do-it-yourself, with the four of them loading equipment every day, and called the whole thing an ongoing dream.

The Joy Rooms

The staging on this third world tour is presented as a set piece rather than a backdrop. Gopakumar's description is that they are carrying the front yard of their home with them, so the audience feels like it has been invited into it. Mid-set the band take a chai break, served in partnership with small chai brands in each territory, and change into shirts made by repurposing saris once worn by their mothers — garments put together by the designers Revathy and Hiba, using Kathakali colour palettes. A documentary on how the costumes were made is in progress.

The same instinct shows up away from the touring circuit. The band have started Nature Tapes in Wayanad, Kerala, which they describe as a community gathering rather than a festival: listening sessions, cooking together and live performance with long-standing fans.