Hail to the King

With hit after chart-busting hit and stellar collabs, King has ascended to music royalty. As he readies himself for an international tour, King tells GQ what it’s like to be on top of the world.

IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE I Arpan Kumar Chandel as anything other than the supremely self-confident young man he is today. As his manager gives me notes on his next album on the sidelines of the GQ photoshoot, Chandel struts his stuff with understated poise, completely at ease in his own skin. Even his chosen moniker-the regal, authoritative "King"-hints at a deep reservoir of self-belief. This is a man who knows what he's worth, and will take nothing less.

And why should he? Since becoming a household name on the first season of rap reality show MTV Hustle in 2019, King has released three well-received albums, broken into Spotify's global charts, bagged a collab with Nick Jonas, and is prepping for a five-country tour, no doubt the first of many. His musican amorphous but delicious khichdi of rap, contemporary pop, and R&B with a '90s Indipop garnish has become inescapable, whether you're on the dance floor or stuck in Mumbai's gridlocked traffic.

But things weren't always this way. Before the regal persona, the hit songs, the sneaker endorsements, the photoshoots, there was just Arpan-a painfully shy young boy with rock star dreams and a burning awareness of the injustice in the way the world worked. The story of Arpan's transformation into King is the sort of thing that pop-star myths are made of.

"When you're poor, the first three things you learn are: This is your mother, this is your father, and these are your financial problems," says Chandel when we sit down for a chat over coffee in the studio's dressing room. Growing up in government quarters in New Delhi's Chanakyapuri, the son of a poorly paid government employee and a housewife, Chandel knows poverty's ability to crush one's spirit firsthand. He remembers having to play with broken hand-me-down toys, the dismissive jeers of more well-to-do peers, the way class circumscribes even the futures you allow yourselves to dream of.