"You seem to like fake marriages a lot."
Coke Studio’s Nu.WAV has released its second offering, ‘Rangeen’, and it arrives as a vivid, bittersweet and visually rich piece of storytelling.
The music video dropped almost two weeks after Afusic, Zoha Waseem and Ali Soomro launched the platform with its debut track ‘Dil’.
‘Rangeen’ pairs singer Hasan Raheem with rising talent Izzchugtai over a production by Umair Tahir, widely known simply as Umair.
Together they transform yearning, young romance and affection into something far more colourful and emotionally layered than a straightforward love song.
The video opens with Raheem on a Lahore rooftop during Basant, surrounded by kites and the restless, charged energy of the city.
He spots a girl across the way, played by model Sukaina Zaidi, and from that single moment an entire imagined romance begins to unfurl in his mind.
The video then slips into pure fantasy as Raheem pictures the courtship and connection against the track’s central theme.
The song’s core lyric, “Rangeen qisson ko tere… mera lahoo kar gaya,” anchors the entire emotional sweep of the video.
Izzchugtai’s arrival shifts the song’s energy once again, adding another dimension and perspective to the romantic fantasy.
His character is the voice of reason, clearly seeing what Raheem cannot, specifically the girl’s evident and unmistakable lack of interest.
In one sequence, Izzchugtai is seen talking sense into a seemingly frustrated Raheem, adding a grounded and comedic counterpoint.
Director Arham Ikram keeps everything deliberately and beautifully unreal throughout, embracing fantasy over realism.
Production designer Hashim Ali leans heavily into nostalgia, filling the frame with patterned tiles, old computers, cassettes, CDs and film posters.
The aesthetic evokes an early 2000s sensibility that gives ‘Rangeen’ a warmly familiar yet distinctly cinematic quality.
Reality eventually intervenes with a pink rickshaw carrying Raheem, his mother, played by Salma Hasan, Izzchugtai and Umair to a wedding.
Ali’s intricately designed sets bring an abundance of colour to the screen, with a two-storey facade glowing against a deepening blue sky.
Warm fairy lights trace every window, door and balcony rail as the setting creates one of the video’s most visually stunning sequences.
The imagined romance reaches what feels like its natural conclusion just as a shehnai announces that a wedding is indeed taking place.
The wedding, however, is not the one Raheem had been dreaming about in his elaborate and colourful romantic fantasy.
The girl he has spent the song imagining a future with is marrying someone else entirely, delivering a bittersweet twist.
Despite the heartbreak, ‘Rangeen’ resists the temptation to turn its ending into full-blown tragedy, maintaining its lightness and colour.
The video also features a moment of Raheem dressed as a dulha while dreaming about Zaidi.
Fans were quick to connect the moment to his earlier promotional campaign for the music video ‘MEMORIES.’
One user pointedly wrote: “You seem to like fake marriages a lot.”
With ‘Rangeen’ building meaningfully on the promise of ‘Dil’, the platform appears to be finding its creative footing.
