Growing up in Scarsdale, Eshan Agarwal didn’t just hear music — he saw it. Synesthesia, the neurological phenomenon where one sense involuntarily triggers another, meant that every melody painted itself in color before it ever reached a page. For Agarwal, it became a compass.

He’s been writing songs since he was five. What started as jingles eventually became something more difficult to name — personal, layered, emotionally precise. For years, it stayed private. Then, gradually, it didn’t. “I realized the stories I was telling in my songs could resonate with other people too,” he says. That realization was the turning point.

Now based in Manhattan while in college, Eshan Agarwal carries the city’s density with him — its contradictions, its emotional intensity, its noise. But the musical foundation runs deeper than geography. His influences span Classic Rock, Jazz, R&B, Musical Theatre, and Pop, which means his frame of reference is wide enough to absorb almost anything. He studies Conan Gray‘s genre-fluid writing, Finneas‘ layered production philosophy, Gracie Abrams‘ lyrical precision, Harry Styles‘ commitment to narrative and aesthetic, and Bruno Mars‘ innate understanding of what makes a song move a room. Each name maps to a craft element he’s actively building into his own work.

What ties it all together is how he writes. Not from a single memory, but from emotion first — melody second, story third. “None of my songs are specific to a particular experience I have had,” he explains. “Rather, I create the story around emotions.” The result is music that feels both universal and intimate, which is a difficult balance to strike and harder still to sustain across an album.

That album, Strangers Again, is the project that marks the shift. With debut singles “The Siren” and “Last Hour” already out, the upcoming record positions Eshan Agarwal as an artist entering a new era — less tentative, more sonically adventurous, more willing to let maturity show in the arrangements.