Prateek Kuhad is in his main character era

A decade ago, Prateek Kuhad stood hunched over a mic at Delhi’s Akshara Theatre. In front of him sat a small audience who’d decided to spend the day savouring the city’s budding independent music scene at a small (and now defunct) arts festival. Behind him stood a large black loudspeaker and a drum set; longtime collaborator Nikhil Vasudevan sat pounding the drums with his left hand and shaking a rattle with his right, a tambourine waiting at his elbow. 

In 2013, Kuhad, then a budding singer-songwriter from Jaipur via New York (with a short-lived career in finance), had had his first taste of fame after the release of his EP Raat Raazi, and an appearance on Pepsi MTV Indies. A year later, against a backdrop of paper bunting, a plastic poster with “DIY DAY” written on it in all-caps Comic Sans, stood Kuhad, dressed in a plain charcoal tee, maroon chinos and simple sneakers, his hair neatly parted, and an acoustic guitar slung across his slight frame. 

As he sang his breakout hit ‘Tune Kaha’, Kuhad’s feet were glued to the spot on that wooden stage, his body tense with concentration. He dropped no false notes, but he had the distinct aura of a nervous schoolboy on stage at assembly rather than one of the most exciting Indian musicians in the making.

This was five years before then US president Barack Obama became his most unexpected champion, mentioning his song ‘cold/mess’ on a list of his favourite music of 2019.

Fast forward to last month, when Kuhad stands on a much larger stage at the Everest Hotel in Kathmandu, Nepal—the first stop on the second leg of his ongoing 48-city Silhouettes tour. This time, he is dressed in a white chikankari shirt and pants, his hair sculpted into a trendy mess. Vasudevan is on percussion duty again, but now he has four other bandmates for company on guitars and keys. ‘Tune Kaha’ is fourth on his set list heaving with hits that flawlessly pour out of Kuhad and his fans in the way that only a played-on-repeat classic does.    

Just as bewitching is Kuhad’s body language, all smiles and easy swaying, amplified on an LED screen, where shots of his performance merge with wide ones of the audience. A definite pivot from the template VFX that has backlit his performances in the past, it’s part of a concept put together in collaboration with Delhi-based creative director Aaquib Wani. It’s a visual spectacle that his fans in India will be treated to on the next leg of the tour, beginning with Hyderabad on November 8. 

If you couldn’t already tell—from all the magazine shoots and Reels collabs with NY-based food influencers, and the globe-straddling scale of the Silhouettes tour—his meditative face beaming upon the audience confirms it. Now, 12 years into a flourishing career as one of India’s most-loved singer-songwriters—with a discography of five EPs and two albums, a big-label record deal, countless festival appearances, tours in different corners of the world, an opening slot for Ed Sheeran and a million-plus strong following on YouTube that tunes in from all parts of the world—Prateek Kuhad has, at last, entered his main character era.

“Man, I exist in a state of discomfort a lot, honestly,” he laughs when I ask him how he shed his shy persona. “I still have weird quirks. I don’t like smiling when I do photos. I actually still don’t like having my photo taken. It’s never been fun, but it’s all become easier over the years. It’s the artist’s dilemma—I do it because I want to make a good thing. But all this will always be outside my comfort zone.” 

On the morning of our Zoom call, Kuhad, just returned from a 22-city tour across the US, is very much in his comfort zone—chomping on carrot slices as he swivels in a leather chair in his home studio in Delhi, a cosy nook furnished with musical instruments, gadgets, a rug and a camera tripod. “Of course I have dreams—bigger venues, bigger albums—but it’s not a set vision,” he continues musing. “It’s more about pushing the boundaries. What else can I do better? And that applies to everything: my relationships with family and friends, the way I love, the way I express myself, the way I make coffee in the mornings. I always wanna make things better.” 

The core of the things Kuhad does remains the same—expertly crafted songs about love and heartbreak, seasoned with a healthy dose of millennial angst. But for the last decade, he’s been busy building a persona, learning how to be a performer and a star who can stand in his own spotlight far outside the glare of mainstream Bollywood and, lately, hip hop. Before Covid, that itch to improve meant masterclasses and workshops with seasoned music producers from around the world and attending music business events so he could build the global network and audience he has always wanted—which is also, ostensibly, part of why he makes both English and Hindi music.

Post Covid—a period in which he felt deeply stifled—Kuhad appears to have narrowed and broadened his vision for himself at once. “I want to be more of an artist, songwriter, musician,” he says. “It’s why I have deliberately let go of the producer hat.” Where he would once sit at his home studio, writing a scratch and recording a demo before going into a studio and asking a producer to “enhance” his work, “recording 30 takes and then comping them aggressively,” he has now decided to do these things simultaneously.  

Take ‘Just Like A Movie’, his new single from 2024. “That happened in New York. The producer, Greg Wattenberg, and I started writing on a guitar and came up with just a verse and a chorus. That’s it. I was like, “This feels nice” and he was like, “Okay, let me work on it.” And I went away. I gave some verbal direction, like I wanted loud drums, but I wasn’t involved in the production. Three weeks later, he sent me the demo which sounded a lot like what it is now, with drums and everything. And I was like whoa, that was totally not what I was expecting, but it sounds kinda sick.”

If you’ve noticed a new, more pop, less folk sound in Kuhad’s music, peg it to the process. If you think Prateek Kuhad is himself somehow more visible, know that this is also somewhat by design. Two of the three new singles that he has released in 2024—‘I’m Someone New’ and ‘Just Like A Movie’—have arrived with music videos in which he is front and centre. “It’s a fallacy that I don’t appear in my music videos,” he protests with a small smile, listing past appearances in ‘Go’, ‘Kasoor’, and ‘Oh Love’. “I couldn’t do ‘cold/mess’ because we thought we needed really brilliant actors for that one, and Jim (Sarbh) and Zoya (Hussain) were perfect. I’ve always been open to being in my music videos. Yes, ‘Just Like A Movie’ was a more actorly thing. But then so much of this is acting—being in front of the camera, being on stage, doing shout-out videos. It’s about a shift in your mindset.” 

On a big-picture level, that is perhaps something that an established, mid-career artist like Kuhad has to imbibe in a time when ‘scenes’ have disappeared, and nothing happens in a niche or bubble anymore. Today, Instagram and TikTok virality denotes success, and art is, in his words, somewhat homogenised. “I try to picture myself at 23, when I was starting out as a musician, in this situation—and I don’t know,” he shakes his head. “You can write a shitty song and still have a hit with a good marketing campaign. That was always the case, but I guess it just didn’t happen as much because a label really had to put money on it. There are a lot more micro successes now.”  

“I’m quite lucky because I think I built my fanbase on my own time on my own terms,” Kuhad adds. “I have earned the luxury of saying no to things that I don’t want to do. And maybe every generation says this, but I’m not a dinosaur. I’m still young. I’m in the middle ground. There’s a lot to do, a lot more to learn.” 

Even before that fortuitous mention that ‘cold/mess’ got from Obama in 2019, Kuhad found himself gravitating to the US, collaborating with writers and producers in LA, Seattle, and New York. “It’s familiar ground, and in the west, the US seems to be the most open to creative output from people who may be outsiders.” Plus, North America is where his biggest audience outside of the Indian subcontinent comes from—something he has gathered not from Spotify data, but from the electric energy at his sold-out shows at massive venues like History in Toronto and The Masonic in San Francisco this year.

“Silhouettes is only about 50-60 dates; it isn’t even the biggest tour I’ve done,” he says when I ask him about how he’s keeping up the stamina to perform, write, and record on the road. “In 2019, we did two North America tours, and I definitely had more dates, with 70-80 shows, which was insane. Both tours were sold out. And if you look at the world tours that artists do, they actually go on world tours. There’s like 100, 150 gigs—you’re playing pretty much every alternate day. This is nothing.” 

But even as Kuhad cements his place in the hall of fame, brick by brick, he betrays none of the restlessness that often comes with ambition. “I look over the last decade and think, it’s a good story. All that crazy insane shit that I did—from the 20-hour taxi rides from Guwahati airport to Ziro festival, overnight, non-stop, to living in weird places, playing weird shows, empty rooms, not empty rooms...it’s been hectic often, painful sometimes, but always good. In hindsight, it’s been stunning.”

I ask him about the new album that he’s been teasing for a release later this year. “I’ve been writing and recording and building a bank of songs, almost, to sift through for this album, in the last year. But I’m also that person who might, at the last minute, decide against it, so please don’t hold me to it,” he says with a laugh. “I get bored easily—and challenging yourself is a fun thing to do.”

Photographer: Sarang Gupta. Styling: Naheed Driver. Styling assistant: Kajal Mehta. Hair and make-up: Kajal Sood. Production: BTG