COVER STORY: NAV On The Brown Boy’s Past, Present and What Comes After

NAV doesn’t describe himself as mysterious. That idea was thrust on him by the outside world — a byproduct of sunglasses, silence, and a career that seemed to accumulate platinum plaques and chart numbers without ever offering much explanation. When I ask him to strip all of that away — the albums, the attention, the mythology — his answer lands with an almost confrontational honesty. 

“I’m a well-raised man. Two very good parents. And I’m a very grateful person and a quick learner,” he says, pausing briefly before adding, “A very fast learner.” 

It’s not an attempt to dodge the question, nor an exercise in humility. It’s orientation — one developed over years of watching the world as much as participating in it. And as our conversation stretches on — moving through Rexdale basements, racist slurs in suburban Canadian classrooms, months of financial pressure that pushed him to quit music altogether, and the strange normalcy of studios The Weeknd, Travis Scott and Future drifted in and out of — it becomes clear that NAV’s understanding of success has never aligned with the world’s expectations of it. In fact, visibility came later, consistency came first, and peace of mind, it turns out, was always the end goal. 

That grounding is deeply tied to his upbringing. Long before Toronto became a global music export hub, and long before NAV’s voice found a presence in modern rap, his childhood was shaped by closeness and compression. His maternal uncle left India at 13, moving first to London and then to Canada, triggering a wave that pulled the rest of the family with him. What followed wasn’t a series of individual moves, but a collective one. Parents, siblings, cousins, spouses — everyone collapsed into a single household, sharing space, responsibility, and survival. 

“We all moved into one house,” NAV tells me. “All my mom’s brothers and sisters and husbands and kids. And I was raised there until I was like three years old.” 

That early environment still influences how he moves through the world. Even now, NAV admits he feels most at ease when surrounded by people — a comfort rooted in those early years when solitude simply didn’t exist. While many artists romanticize isolation as the price of creation, NAV’s relationship with being alone has always been different. “The toughest thing for me to do is be alone,” he says. “So when I spend time alone is when I find, like, a center.” 

Music didn’t enter his life as an ambition so much as proximity. One uncle was professional singer, another played keys, and studios weren’t intimidating or inaccessible spaces — they were familiar rooms that family members moved in and out of after work. The first time NAV saw how a song came together, it didn’t feel like a dream revealing itself; it felt procedural. 

“I’d seen how the songs get made, and I told my mom I want to do it,” he recalls. His uncle bought him a small piece of equipment. 

Outside the safety of home, the difference was obvious. Growing up in predominantly white suburban Canadian schools, NAV encountered racism early and directly — not in coded language, but blunt slurs that made it clear where he stood. “When I was growing up, at first, there was a lot of racism,” he says. “It was mostly white people who were in school. The racist white kids would call us Pakis, this, this, that.” 

That changed by middle school, when immigration patterns reshaped his environment. Punjabi children, Jamaican families, and West Indian households began filling classrooms and neighborhoods, creating a more layered sense of community. “It became very multicultural,” NAV says. 

By the time he began making beats at 16, music wasn’t yet framed as escape or aspiration. It was instinct — a place his attention landed naturally. Progress, however, was slow and uneven. Well into his 20s, NAV was still recording wherever he could make it work, often in his mother’s house, surrounded by fragile equipment that barely held together. “I was recording songs at my mom’s house, like, in my bedroom,” he says. “It was a hundred-dollar microphone, a laptop. My equipment was broken.” 

This is the stretch most success narratives erase — the years where nothing clicked, when quitting felt rational, even responsible. NAV walked away from music more than once. He tried to make money in the streets, exploring stability as an alternative to obsession. “I tried to do a lot of different things,” he says. “I was running around in the streets, getting money. Then I tried to work regular jobs.” 

One of those jobs, training as an electrician, brought a sense of clarity. On site, NAV wore headphones constantly, using music to endure work that never felt like his own. When a coworker complained about a mistake, and his boss banned headphones altogether, the restriction hit harder than expected. “That’s when I knew, like, I had to quit,” he says. “Just try music again.” 

That decision didn’t arrive in a vacuum. At home, the pressure had intensified. His father lost a stable forklift job when the company shut down, plunging the family into financial uncertainty and forcing responsibilities onto NAV and his sister that they’d never carried before. “Shit got really tough on me, my sister,” he says. “With that pressure and not getting any success out of the music that I’m working on, it just made me [feel] like, fuck music. I can’t do it.” 

What ultimately pushed him back wasn’t inspiration — a concept NAV openly distrusts — but dissatisfaction with everything else. “When you try to figure what you want to do in life, you’ve got to go do stuff that you don’t want to do,” he explains. “I just didn’t like the feeling of that.” That philosophy still underpins how he operates now, prioritizing discipline over motivation and showing up over waiting. “You can’t wait for inspiration,” he says flatly. “Inspiration comes to you when you least expect it.” 

By the time NAV stepped into his first truly major studio session, he wasn’t chasing a breakthrough so much as just producing, doing what he had quietly done for years. That session happened during Starboy, with The Weeknd standing directly behind him as he worked. “He was like, make some beats,” NAV remembers. “And I made three beats really fast, and he started singing right behind me.” 

What followed was access to studios that felt communal rather than transactional. Travis Scott dropping by, songs taking shape without ceremony, music becoming work, and work becoming routine. “Travis Scott’s coming over,” NAV remembers. “He’s just coming over. Like, every artist is just coming around and casually, like, yo, this is NAV. And here’s the song and they all like my music and we all work together.” 

As labels began flying him to Los Angeles with offers, NAV said no — deliberately and repeatedly. He read, paid attention, and understood that moving too early meant losing leverage. “I just kept saying no to everybody,” he says. XO, the Canadian music label founded by The Weekend, wasn’t even on his radar at first; they didn’t sign artists at the time, at least not in the way he was imagining. So when the call finally came, it felt like the universe breaking pattern. “I never even thought of XO as an option because they don’t sign artists,” he says. “So when they called me, I knew instantly, like, this is it. That was an instant yes. Right away.” 

The partnership that followed wasn’t a conventional major-label story. Before there was a record deal on the table, there was investment — literal and emotional. “Cash [XO] was like, hey, we don’t want to go sign a record dealer and get like, shitted on,” NAV says. “So let’s build the leverage.” CashXO (co-founder of XO Records) poured his own money into visuals and infrastructure. “Cash put almost a million dollars out of his own pocket to shoot videos and whatever,” NAV says. “And then La Mar [Taylor] would be there finding the camera guy, styling me. Yeah. He did everything hands-on.” Those early years were less about aesthetics than architecture: working out how NAV should look, sound, and exist in public, while still feeling like himself. 

Today, his operation is leaner, guided more by trust than scale. The core is small now — mostly NAV and Buck$y Luchiiano — but the principle hasn’t changed. “You can’t do anything alone,” he says. “It’s impossible. Like, even like if you go work in a company, like there’s multiple employees doing different things. So it’s the same thing in music.” The job isn’t just about management or logistics; it’s about ego — or rather, the lack of it. “You need a team with no ego, no pride,” he adds. “Everybody got each other’s back, and teamwork is dream work.” 

That belief was tested most clearly on his 2025 album OMW2 Rexdale, a project he doesn’t position as his biggest or boldest, but as something else entirely. “It’s more like a passion project,” he explains. The seed for it came from a decision most artists at his level would avoid: opening up a direct channel to fans and then actually listening. NAV started a Discord server and watched it swell to around 20,000 people, many of them day-one listeners who weren’t shy about saying exactly what they wanted from him. “They would just complain, complain, complain,” he says. “Tell me they want this kind of song, they want Old NAV back.” 

What stayed with him wasn’t just the volume of those demands, but the way they began to influence his own decision-making. For an artist who had spent most of his career letting the music speak and avoiding over-explaining his choices, being pulled into that level of commentary felt disruptive. “It kind of hurt me a little bit because I listened to them too much,” he admits. The feedback began to shape how he saw himself in relation to his catalogue and his audience. 

The album that came out of it wasn’t designed to reset his career or unlock a new era. It was built to give that core section of his fanbase what they’d been asking for and, in his mind, to close a loop. “I feel like the album was conversely successful,” he says. “But for my day one fans and for, like, them, I know they were satisfied and happy, and they can move on now. No more Old NAV — Old NAV gone.” He talks about it less as a triumphant return to a sound and more as an intentional goodbye to a version of himself that fans refused to let go of. 

Not everyone around him loved it. His close friends — “mostly black, Jamaican people,” as he describes them — like him better in a heavier, more aggressive mode. “They want to hear aggressive,” he says. “They like when I go aggressive.” He found himself explaining to them that this wasn’t about chasing numbers or pleasing everyone; it was about finishing something. “I was just like explaining to them, look, like I have to close the album,” he remembers. “And the only way I can close it is by giving these kids what they want. I try my best and sacrifice myself for the kids.” The fans wanted outros, interludes, “slow stuff, dream, dream,” even when he wasn’t creatively in that space anymore. It took time to find the right beats, to get into that headspace again. “I wasn’t even in the mood to make that stuff,” he says. “And it would take me so long to find beats, and, like, the right beats took me forever.” 

When the dust settled, the numbers didn’t match his highest expectations. He doesn’t dress that up. “I didn’t do as good as I wanted to,” he says plainly. But in another way, the project did exactly what it was supposed to do. “They left me alone and let me do whatever I want to do,” he adds. The constant “Old NAV” comments have faded. The pressure to recreate a specific era has shifted off his shoulders. 

That shift has changed how he’s thinking about the next phase. With the old demands quieted, NAV is recording more freely again, leaning into whatever he feels like making instead of trying to reverse-engineer what people say they miss. “Now it’s all about my friends’ opinions for the new project,” he says. The urgency that once surrounded every release — the sense that each drop had to prove something — has softened into something more deliberate. 

The weight of other people’s opinions hasn’t been harmless over the years. When I ask if criticism has affected his mental health in a real way, he doesn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” he says. It’s not one or two random comments that get to him, but patterns — when “more than 10, 20 people” are saying the same thing and the numbers line up with what they’re saying. That’s when he knows he has to pay attention and adjust, the way an athlete would if their weak points kept showing up on tape. At the same time, he understands when it’s time to pull back. “Therapy is good,” he says simply, as both a personal truth and a recommendation. 

His idea of success has shifted shape along the way. Earlier in his career, every new milestone seemed to immediately trigger the question of what came next. He racked up platinum singles, gold albums, and placements like “Lemonade,” climbing into the Billboard charts in ways he never expected. “I never like, I never really started enjoying the moment until now,” he admits. Even the physical proof of those achievements has begun to feel different. His house doesn’t have the wall space to keep up with the number of plaques anymore. “My house, I have no room on my walls for the plaques,” he says. “I just put them in my garage in boxes.” 

The achievements he singles out now are specific and measured: “Two Number One albums in a row,” he says, referring to Bad Habits and Good Intentions. “Top 10 on Billboard with ‘Lemonade.’” Landing a placement in a Spider-Man film with “the best radio and petrol.” “So that were like my three biggest accomplishments,” he says, half-laughing at the phrasing but fully serious about the pride behind it. 

The story that seems to move him most, though, has nothing to do with chart positions. It’s the night he finally brought his family to see him perform at an arena in Toronto — the first time they ever saw him on stage. He waited on purpose. “I wanted to wait till I did something big,” he says. He sent three or four black trucks to pick them up, had them driven through the same underground entrances reserved for basketball players, and made sure there was a private room and a suite where they could watch. His mom cried the whole time. “That’s when I feel like they understood,” he says. That show was years into his career. “That was the first show they ever saw.” 

As his touring map has widened, his understanding of the audience has evolved with it. Coachella, which was the first booking he ever got as an artist back in 2016, forced him to level up his performance early. He wasn’t ready then, by his own admission, and had to take a few shows just to practice. When he returned years later to the Sahara Tent, leaping into a crowd of tens of thousands, he felt like a different version of himself. Japan stood out because of how engaged people were, even when they didn’t know every song. “Even if they didn’t know the song that I’m performing,” he says, “they’re just jumping, excited, happy.” Rolling Loud in Thailand, a stint in Riyadh performing for a fight promotion where he was put on TV between bouts — all of it added new contexts for his music to live in. 

India, though, carries its own weight. For a long time, he genuinely didn’t know what his presence here looked like beyond social media. “Being in America all the time, I couldn’t really tell, like, if I had fans or…” he trails off. “So I had to come here.” This run isn’t about checking a box or proving a point. It’s about putting real faces and energy to numbers he’d been seeing from afar, and about understanding his place in a scene that has been building its own momentum with or without him. 

On the ground, that’s translated into both friendships and collaborations. His “Punjabi success,” as he calls it, really began with Money Musik — the producer he found at 17 who now moves in his own orbit, making records with artists like Lil Uzi Vert and AP Dhillon. “He’s my golden boy,” NAV says, proud that he doesn’t have to watch over his work anymore. “I didn’t really have to do much,” he adds. “Now I don’t even have to watch him.” 

His new song with Karan Aujla grew out of a simple internal question: who should get the first look from him in Punjabi music? He watched Aujla’s journey — “a lot of bad videos,” a long grind, the kind of consistency that turns into ubiquity — and respected what it took to get there. They eventually linked up through Ikky, the producer NAV now talks to a lot. “So, me and Ikky linked up and clicked instantly and became friends,” he recalls. “And I guess Ikky’s like, yo, Karan, we got to do something.” The result is a remix of Aujla’s track “Daytona” that the duo released during Aujla’s headliner set at Rolling Loud India. Best part? NAV only met Aujla in person the day of the show. “It’s crazy,” he says of that timing, but it feels right to him. 

Then some relationships are still in motion. He met some local rappers at events — like the night at Shah Rukh Khan’s son’s party, where “everybody was there” — and they traded numbers, even if lining up studio time across continents was complicated. NAV constantly checks in on emerging artists he likes, messages people like Cheema Y when their songs catch his ear. And he’s clear about who else he wants to eventually work with. “Of course,” he says when I ask about AP Dhillon. An entire project with Indian artists, he tells me, isn’t out of the question. “Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. In the near future. Yeah? Yeah. For sure.” 

NAV looks beyond Indian artists as a market segment, talks about them as part of a larger arc he sees himself connected to — a wave of brown artists becoming global on their own terms. “I love you guys, and I do this for us,” he says when I ask if he has a message for fans here. “And I just hope to see just more and more brown artists emerging and becoming successful and just taking over the world.” 

Looking at NAV now, it’s tempting to frame this period as a clean arrival point — the chapter where everything finally makes sense. But that would miss what he’s actually describing. What’s happening is alignment: between the kid raised in a crowded house, the artist who kept saying no until the right door opened, and the man now learning to prioritize peace over noise. The “mystery” that once got projected onto him was never distance for the sake of it; it was restraint, survival, and choice. 

Now, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in maintaining even that. He isn’t chasing anything anymore. He’s choosing carefully what, and who, he carries forward. 

NAV wears jewellery by IRIS Fine Jewels

Cover Credits
Creative Director: Peony Hirwani
Photographer: Samrat Nagar
Executive Editor: Shamani Joshi
Creative Producer: Prachee Mashru
Stylist: Rushi Honmore
Hair & Makeup: Bugz Hairmafia
Motion Cover Director & Editor: Jonathan Mathew
Production Assistant: Dalia Nouf Shaikh
Junior Editorial Associate: Sharanyaa Nair
Photography Assistants: Zahrah Vahanvaty & Suraj Seksaria
Cover Layout: AK Digitals
Styling Assistants: Shriyaa Kirdat & Pyu Mishra
Dressman: Mukhtaar Shaikh
DOP: Vivan Shukla
Colorist: Vedant Kothari
BTS: Vivan Shukla
Interactive Video: Jonathan Mathew
Editorial Intern: Shradha Paul
Brand Team: Agent, Sebastian Shaji
Head of Brand Partnerships & Experiences: Esha Singh
Business Head: Pawan Thukral
Brand Manager: Veer Mehta
Luxury Car Partner: Jaguar Land Rover
Catering Partner: Hundo Pizza
Location: Vitamin Studio, Andheri