Two singers perform AR Rahman’s new track ‘Muththa Mazhai’, crowds debate which is better

In Mani Ratnam’s films, a voice is not just a voice. It is a kind of weather. A mist over a train window, a wail that lingers after the character has left the frame. From Thalapathi to Ponniyin Selvan, the voice has often functioned as something elemental, not quite music and not quite dialogue—more like atmosphere with intent. That space flickers open again with the release of Muththa Mazhai, a melancholic ballad from Thug Life, the new Mani–Rahman collaboration, a project already heavy with expectation. The song is sung by Dhee, whose voice floats like smoke in a room. But Chinmayi Sripaada too had recorded a version. “There is no comparison,” she said in an interview—but there was already a contrapuntal study underway on the internet about the two distinct versions of a Rahman song, sung by two women whose musical sensibilities lie at opposite ends of the playback spectrum.

Muththa Mazhai unfolds in the soft shadows of a modal minor scale where every note feels brushed with longing. The tempo is slow, almost suspended, and the orchestration is gossamer-light: ambient pads, piano droplets, and a choral bed that breathes. Structurally, it’s a ballad without drama—a lament held in hush, its architecture designed to seep and to linger.

Dhee’s voice enters Muththa Mazhai like a sliver. She seems to sing not from the centre of a tune, but from the outskirts of mood. The vowels smudge into one another, consonants sometimes vanish like chalk in the rain. There is no linearity, no vibrato. Instead, there’s air, texture, and a faint friction at the edges—as though she is pushing sound through a velvet sieve. It is the sort of voice Rahman has come to favour. In the post-Ponniyin Selvan landscape, he has pivoted toward what we might call lo-fi mysticism: female vocals that behave more like sonic elements than agents of narrative.

Dhee’s sonic signature—marked by breathy restraint and an almost disembodied cool—was cemented in Enjoy Enjaami. That track introduced a generation to a voice less invested in presence. Her tone, chest-bound and husky, does not deliver emotion as much as dissolve into it. It is a performance of vanishing. At times, her rendering struggles to inhabit the semi-classical phrasing of Rahman’s composition; the Tamil diction falters. But what she offers is a contemporary texture—a certain moodiness—that suits a cinema increasingly tuned to affect over precision. Ironically, it’s the background chorus in her version that shines brightest.

Chinmayi’s version insists on something else. Not just musicality—though her pitch-centering, breath control and diction are immaculate—but musical memory. Her performance at the Thug Life audio launch is a case in point: the tone is clear, the vibrato deliberate, the breath phrases consciously shaped. There is emotional control but also dramatic inflection—especially in how she enters the melodic line with a slight push, a rounding of the vowel, a soft ache. Where Dhee evaporates, Chinmayi etches. Her interpretation restores the melodic arc that Rahman only hints at in the ambient version. It is no longer the ghost of a song—it is the full-bodied memory of it.

And it is this memory, this classical clarity and emotional weight, that better suits Trisha’s on-screen presence. The strength of Chinmayi’s phrasing mirrors the way Trisha carries emotion—with grace, without blur. Hers is a face that demands articulation, not abstraction. In contrast, Dhee’s version, with its diffused edges and almost whispered sorrow, seems to belong to a different kind of character.

Chinmayi’s rendition is layered, unforced, precise in a way that doesn’t show off but reveals. She doesn’t sing to dazzle; she sings to dwell. Each note knows where it must land, and why. There’s a quiet authority to her performance—the kind forged not just by years of rigorous training, but by exile. And that’s what makes this track all the more special. It is a jubilant comeback. After years of unofficial silencing, Muththa Mazhai arrives like an answer. Chinmayi doesn’t ask for space; she takes it—gently, unmistakably.

For the past decade, Chinmayi had become something of a ghost, not because she fell out of favour musically, but because she refused to play mute. Her outspokenness during the #MeToo movement, especially against powerful figures in the Tamil film industry, triggered a palpable exclusion. That Rahman invited her to record this version at all marks a moment of quiet restitution.

Rahman has always been a composer of surfaces and depths. He hears not just note and key but grain. But in recent years, he has shown a marked interest in textured, breathy vocals—a sound shaped by a digital listening culture. Which makes sense in an era of earbuds and Instagram, where a whisper carries weight. But it also narrows the range of what a female playback voice can be. Where male singers—Arijit Singh, Sid Sriram—still get to emote, to expand, to take up sonic space, female voices are increasingly asked to vanish beautifully.

Reddit threads, which have become the new sabhas of aesthetic debate, mirror this divide. Dhee’s rendition is praised as “haunting”, “textured” and “emotionally true”. Chinmayi’s, meanwhile, is lauded for its “purity”, “depth” and ability to “carry the weight of the lyric”. One user called it “pure magic”; another said, “Dhee fit the scene, but Chinmayi touched the soul.” The argument is not about superiority—it is about sensibility. What kind of voice does Tamil cinema now desire? What kind does it dare to remember?

And so we arrive at this paradox. Dhee, with her burnt-sugar rasp, represents not just the new sound of Rahman’s women but the politics of that sound. Her tone is urban, ironic, removed. It speaks in the idiom of now—of detachment, of diasporic inflection, of a Spotified world. Chinmayi, in contrast, sings like someone who knows where the body of the melody is buried—and insists on digging it up. Her voice does not want to float. It wants to land. And that very desire, to resolve, to articulate, to exist fully in the song, feels almost countercultural now.

What makes this moment fascinating is not the supposed rivalry between these two playback singers, but the coexistence of their takes. If Mani Ratnam’s world has room for both, then the sonic spectrum is not yet flattened. In some sound engineer’s hard drive, maybe they sit side by side.

AR RahmanChinmayiDheeMuththa MazhaiNews BriefThug LifeWeb Exclusive