Weird Genius Turned a Vanishing Sumba Instrument Into Their Next International Single

A Dying Instrument, One Last Recording

In early 2026, Weird Genius spent two weeks on Sumba, the East Nusa Tenggara island better known to outsiders for its horses and its surf breaks than for its music, looking for the jungga and the dungga roro: stringed instruments that younger generations on the island have largely stopped learning to play.

They found Umbu Haling, one of the last musicians who does, and recorded him opening the track that became "Your Side," a collaboration with Indonesian pop singer Novia Bachmid released that May. It's a synth-pop record with a traditional Sumban musician's voice at the front of it, and the trio has been blunt about what the trip actually was: a rescue mission for instruments that are a generation from disappearing, dressed up as a single.

The Song That Made Them the First Asian Act on Astralwerks

This isn't a new move for Weird Genius. The Jakarta trio, formed in 2016 by Reza Oktovian and Eka Gustiwana, built their entire breakthrough on the same instinct: take Indonesia's own traditional music and run it through festival-grade EDM production instead of trying to sound like everyone else on a Tomorrowland lineup. Their first real single, "DPS," leaned on Balinese gamelan. The one that actually broke them, "Lathi," went further: Javanese lyrics, gamelan samples, the seven-note pelog scale, sung by Sara Fajira over a drop built for a festival main stage.

Released in February 2020, "Lathi" hit number one on Spotify Indonesia's Top 50 and number two on Spotify's Global Viral 50, and the "Lathi Challenge" turned into one of TikTok's biggest trends that year, pulling in covers from Indonesian celebrities and random strangers trying to mimic Sara Fajira's face-paint transformation on camera. The video passed 55 million YouTube views within two months of release. That August, Astralwerks, the Universal Music Group label that put out Daft Punk and The Chemical Brothers in the West, signed Weird Genius, making them the label's first act from Asia. "'Lathi' is the hottest record to come out of Southeast Asia in recent months," the label's Toby Andrews said at the time. The track went on to win three trophies at that year's Anugerah Musik Indonesia awards, the country's biggest music awards show.

Six Years of Collaborators, One Lineup Change

What followed was a run of collaborations most Indonesian acts never get near: "Hush" with Dutch duo Yellow Claw, "Last Summer" with Tokyo Machine and Lights, "Future Ghost" with Thai-Belgian singer Violette Wautier, a soundtrack placement on Riot Games' League of Legends: Wild Rift, and an anthem remix with producer LTZ for the 2023 FIFA U-17 World Cup, hosted in Indonesia that year. Along the way the lineup shifted: founding member Billy Taner left in 2019, and Gerald Liu departed in October 2023 to go solo, replaced by producer Roycdc (Roy Leonard Soewarno). The current trio, Oktovian, Gustiwana and Roycdc, is the one that spent those two weeks in Sumba.

Why Sumba, and Why Now

The band has talked about "Your Side" as a deliberate loop back to where they started. "In 2016 we went to Bali and made 'DPS,'" they said of the new record. "Ten years later, we went to Sumba." They're advertising the parallel on purpose. Where "Lathi" treated Javanese gamelan as a texture to drop into a chorus, "Your Side" is built the other way around: the jungga and dungga roro aren't decoration on a pop song, they're the reason the song exists at all, with Umbu Haling's voice placed where most EDM records would put a drop.

It's a smaller story than a Billboard chart placement, and that's rather the point. Southeast Asia's EDM trios usually get written up for how big they got internationally, not for who they paid attention to on the way. Weird Genius's actual case for mattering is that the two instincts, Astralwerks-sized ambition and a two-week trip to record an instrument most streaming listeners have never heard of, come from the same place.

"Your Side" is streaming on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.

Cover photo: Weird Genius, by Ejja Pahlevi, via Mundane Mag.