As he settles into superstardom and unlocks a new phase in his career, the genre-defying musician weighs in on evolution, representation and the importance of being himself
AP Dhillon isn’t here yet, and yet he has arrived. It’s the afternoon after the premiere party for AP Dhillon: First of a Kind—which lasted late into the previous night—and a day before the documentary arrives on Prime Video. He has a busy day ahead of him, busier than most of us, doing something he has been avoiding so far: Meeting the press. Doing his first Rolling Stone cover shoot. And he’s running almost two hours behind schedule.
Not that it matters to those who wait. Someone plays “With You” for the third time in a row off a loudspeaker. The room can’t help but move to the infectious hook of Dhillon’s new track. Meanwhile, social media and websites are tripping on the AP Dhillon news cycle—his arrival in India, that music video, rumours of the budding romance, the impromptu gig in Delhi, the crowd-surfing moment at a college in Mumbai.
Barely three years after his career took off into outer space, AP Dhillon has transformed into the kind of rarefied artist-celebrity that occupies rooms—attention spans, conversations, the very ether—before he even enters them. And when he isn’t, he’s busy hogging the charts. As I write this, “With You” is second the most-streamed track in India on Apple Music and #3 on Spotify, just behind Jasleen Royal’s “Heeriye” (with Arijit Singh and Dulquer Salmaan).
No less than three of AP Dhillon’s songs are among Spotify’s Top 50 – India daily list. It isn’t even a new thing. Last year, Dhillon was the only living hip hop artist on Spotify Wrapped 2022’s most streamed artists, a list that has been dominated by film music greats like AR Rahman, Arijit Singh, Pritam, Anirudh Ravichander and Shreya Ghoshal. (The only other hip-hop artist was the late Sidhu Moose Wala.)
One album, three EPs, several singles, over a billion streams and millions of followers on social media—Dhillon is arguably the first bonafide global Indian star of the streaming era. Much like wunderkinder Lil Nas X, The Kid LAROI and Hasan Raheem, Dhillon’s spectacular rise to fame is a case study in the radical possibilities that streaming has created for artists to be discovered around the world.
But, Dhillon’s also an exception. He wasn’t snatched up by a major label. He didn’t immediately go on radio shows and podcasts to talk about himself. He didn’t sign up for major platforms like Coke Studio to bask in some of that shared limelight. He chose instead to keep making music, back it up with excellent visuals, go on the road, and let the art speak for itself.
It’s no small feat for an independent artist, resisting the call of Bollywood and demands of self-promotion, sitting on the other side of the world, to sustain this level of interest and momentum. Indeed, part of the hype stems from the mystique he has worn like a shroud. Who is this self-styled superstar, with his preternatural talent and audacious sense of style, who coolly arrived on our radar in the autumn of 2020, and refuses to leave?
When he does step into this room—the garden-facing tea lounge at the Taj Land’s End in suburban Mumbai—Dhillon is by far the tallest guy. His undercut and beard are freshly trimmed. He looms over the rest of us in a sharp black suit. He smiles often, and speaks in a surprisingly low, deep voice. A two-person security detail accompanies him, glaring at those of us who try to get too close.
The music is quickly switched from his discography to a trap-heavy playlist. The voices and words of Don Toliver, Central Cee, Gunna fill the room. Everyone is removed from his line of sight. Dhillon springs into action: He poses like a pro, switches looks, favorites some shots, confers with his crew, takes some business decisions, takes selfies for fans, and dishes on his life and career—all within an hour, without breaking a sweat.
“I’m just putting myself out there,” Dhillon says with a small laugh, slouched in a chair post-shoot, when I ask him about this phase of his life. “This is the time for fans—the whole world—to get to know me. And not just me, but the whole team.” The documentary is a first step in that direction. Even though it focuses on Dhillon’s artistry and struggle to reach this point, it is no vanity project, he assures me.
It isn’t the candid tell-all that his fans have been yearning for, either. “I didn’t have that blueprint to follow because it was such a first of a kind audience. It’s informative and it’s meant to be helpful to young artists—be they in film or music or anything else.” And so that’s the intention: to present a nuts-and-bolts look at the business of music, from the perspective of a staunchly independent musician and his crew (and second family) at Run Up Records, who are in total command of their craft, sound and narrative. “It’s good to inspire people,” he nods.
Dhillon’s story begins in 1993, in Gurdaspur, a town in Punjab that is a two-hour drive from the India-Pakistan border. Amrit Pal was a middle-class boy whose family had seen more than their fair share of difficulties, though he still refuses to go into details about that. He liked sports. He didn’t like school. He liked hanging out with his friends. Just another regular teenager.
“I was fond of music, but it wasn’t like I wanted to become an artist.” They were not a musically-inclined family, he says, although he did absorb Golden-era Bollywood and Punjabi hits off the radio and TV. Music wasn’t a real possibility anyway. “I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, but my Dad was like nah, focus on school,” he laughs.
After graduating from engineering college in Punjab, he headed West, to Canada, to pursue a degree in business in 2015. A recent Instagram post shows him sitting on a staircase the night before he left the country. In the video, a younger, more carefree Dhillon, a full mop of hair on his head and an acoustic guitar in his hand, sings a mellifluous Punjabi number.
In the caption, Dhillon talks about the struggles of the immigrant life, including money problems and language barriers. He only ever hints at his own experiences with these things—such as a fragment of a memory about spending a night on the street with his suitcases—without ever going into specifics. “We are all trying to find our way in a world that we don’t understand and that doesn’t understand us.”
Dhillon’s own way to navigate this “treacherous, toxic world” has been to create music. “When I started out, I started from ground zero,” he says. He built a studio the size of a small dining table in a garage in Vancouver, engineering the insulation, sound, acoustics by himself. He taught himself how to write, arrange, record, mix and master music. “That was all something you learn from not having money and having to figure it out on your own. It’s the hustle, right?”
Along the road he found Shinda Kahlon, Gurinder Gill and Gminxr, equally talented artists, kindred spirits and loyal stage mates. They wrote, produced and sang for each other. When labels this and that side of the world told them their music was not cutting it, they launched their own. At the heart of their project was a unique sound. “I spent over a year just in the studio, frustrated, just trying to put together the sound,” he shakes his head. “It doesn’t come overnight.”
That sound—a potent, all-encompassing, ever-evolving mix of Punjabi folk, hip-hop, trap and R&B, powered by the rhymes, rhythms and voices of all three artists—is one major reason for Dhillon’s peerless success. “AP Dhillon feels at once folky in the Punjabi context and the North American context,” observes Himanshu Suri aka Heems, the Queens-origin rapper of Punjabi descent, ex-Das Racist MC who has also worked in A&R at Spotify.
In mainstream Indian hip-hop, Punjabi rap, with its two-decade long arc, is the oldest offshoot. In 2002, Bohemia dropped his seminal album, Vich Pardesan De. It quickly ascended to the top of the BBC Radio UK Charts, and Bohemia had drawn a straight line from Compton to Chandigarh. Since then, Punjabi hip-hop has thrown up stars like Yo Yo Honey Singh to Mika to Raftaar to Badshah—and a template for the next big club banger, that involved rhymes about girls, drugs, cars, beefs, the high life.
As hip-hop has spread across India in the last decade, it has evolved into an exercise in radical thought, where authenticity and truth-speaking have come to hold greater value than stunting (well, to a degree). DIVINE, Prabh Deep and MC Stan’s street-speak is about the hard knocks of life, and how dreaming big can be an act of defiance. They flex, but they also introspect.
The early tracks and music videos that Dhillon put out in late 2019 to early 2020 were windows into the very masculine worlds of these Punjabi boys. “Fake,” one of the very first, was a dark track about heartbreak—desi in spirit and drill in essence. “Majhail” was an ode to the warriors of Majha, the region of Punjab that Dhillon hails from, with lyrics laid over the beat from Ashanti and Fat Joe’s 2002 hit “What’s Luv.” “Deadly,” the only one of Dhillon’s music videos to feature guns, spoke of exercising caution and living one’s life despite being surrounded by violence.
The world was writhing in the throes of the pandemic when “Brown Munde” arrived in September 2020—an anthem for South Asian solidarity that echoed over headphones around the globe, uniting us in some kind of borderless silent rave. The video for “Brown Munde” featured NAV, Steel Banglez and Sidhu Moose Wala, three of the biggest names in the desi rap movement gaining momentum then. It was the first of Dhillon’s music to resonate with a non-Punjabi-speaking audience. It made him a star overnight.
“Brown Munde” was proof that where Indian hip-hop had been trying to find common ground between the East and West, reality and aspiration; Dhillon had vaulted over the very notion of latitudes and tapped into some invisible frequency. What’s been consistent since is clean rhymes, a focus on melody, and little to no aggression. It’s why Dhillon’s music has resonated with millennials and Gen Z from Vancouver to Varanasi; but is also ever-present in the wedding DJ’s playlist. It sounds familiar, yet new, to everyone. And it sounds like music.
“Dhillon’s ear for production is also adventurous,” observes Heems. “Besides exploring hip-hop beats familiar to listeners around the world, he doesn’t shy away from other influences outside India, from guitar-centric disco to electronic. He thinks about every aspect of his music, excelling from his voice, to lyrics, to the musicality of his production.”
“With You” showcases Dhillon’s versatility; and its music video, co-starring the actor Banita Sandhu, demonstrates of his insatiable desire to create. Gone, for now, are the earthy vocals, the micro crests and troughs of his voice, in favor of a more smudged, softer flutter. Ever gentler melodies and beats, real women (not just dreamgirls), less flashy cars and castles in the background—Dhillon has, in the last year, cultivated a pop orientation and softboi aesthetic that’s only further expanded his fandom.
What new shapes can we expect this sound to shift into? “I just released ‘Sleepless,’ which is early style house music,” says Dhillon, adding that he doesn’t know what the next inspiration is going to be. “That’s also part of the whole idea of putting ourselves out of the box, trying to do something different.”
“I’m also thinking of putting out an EP with this documentary series which I still need to finish.” That three-track EP, named after the documentary, arrived weeks after this conversation. Alongside “With You,” there’s also “Scars” and “Lifestyle,” written by Kahlon—with that patent mash of hip-hop, pop and dance sounds, the perfect soundtrack for that late night gedi.
Experiments lie elsewhere. Dhillon says he has some deep house tracks recorded and ready but after a pause he adds: “I don’t think it’s the right time to put it out there yet. It might be too much for the audience.” Too much? “I feel like we started with a hip-hop track and that fanbase wants hip-hop,” Dhillon explains. “Then we put out pop, and now that fanbase wants pop. It’s hard to keep everyone happy. But as an artist you get bored of doing the same music. I mean, you can—if you’re just looking for the same hits, the streaming, the numbers, but I feel like you don’t really evolve. And for me, it’s about doing more with different styles of music.”
Fan expectations are one thing; the industry’s another. “When I worked at Spotify,” says Heems, “I was tasked with bringing Indian music to global audiences, learning from the Latin team there. I worked alongside African and Arab editors who had the same objective, bringing local genres not just to the diaspora but to Western audiences as well.”
“We now see success in artists like Bad Bunny and Burna Boy, showing it takes one big artist to really open the floodgates,” Heems observes. “At one point that artist seemed to be Sidhu Moose Wala, but since his death, it seems AP Dhillon is poised to be that artist for Punjabi music and Indian music as a whole.”
Dhillon appears to be aware of this, but claims that his focus is just to stay true to his craft. To be human, to keep making music. But he does have lofty visions for the label. “I feel like I want to start bringing other artists into Run Up,” he muses. “Probably put a team out here to find talent and nurture it. I feel like we’re a billion people, there’s got to be a lot of talent out here—and in Canada and in the States.”
“Because at first, none of those west side labels wanted to come work, and then we woke this sleeping giant,” he smiles. “Now they’re all here, but they don’t understand the culture. They’re just here to find the next hit and make the money. For us, it’s about finding the next AP, the next Shinda, the next Gurinder and helping them in the right way,” Dhillon says, a glint in his eye. “You know, instead of sucking their blood.”
Photographer: Sasha Jairam
Creative Director: Kapil Batus
Styling: Nikita Jaisinghani
Clothes : Zegna FW2023
Video by: Aman
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