KURU

"COVID was weird," he said in 2023. "I wasn't really doing school or talking to anyone, but I was really locked in with music." The pandemic did something specific to this generation of artists — it collapsed the distance between isolation and output. For kuru it meant months of non-stop recording, a mixed bag of everything from breakbeat experiments to songs about Among Us, all of it feeding into a developing ear that was absorbing J-pop, drill, cloud rap, and whatever else he could find.

The numbers on SoundCloud started moving. He started taking it seriously.

But he knew early on that singles and streams weren't enough. He called himself a "SoundCloud kid" not as a flex but as a burden — something to prove his way out of. The scene was full of artists who had a moment and then disappeared. He watched it happen. To him, the only real answer was an album. Something with shape and intention. Something that couldn't be written off.

That album became re:wired. Released November 2024 on deadAir, it took years longer than anyone around him expected — his friends were laughing about the timeline when he brought it up in interviews. But what he built in that time was 18 tracks that genuinely sounded like nothing else in the genre.

Drum and bass breaks bleeding into shoegaze-leaning textures. Cloud rap flows sitting over synth clouds that felt almost orchestral. Lucy Bedroque on "save;file-9." The whole thing put together with the care of someone who had spent years thinking about what his first real statement should sound like.

Pitchfork gave it a 7.1 and called it "a panic room crammed with miseries, victories, betrayals, realizations, and music so dreamy it somehow sounds idyllic." He wasn't a SoundCloud kid anymore.

Then March 20, 2026. deadAir drops "FW19" — directed by Blindlight — and announces Backstage Hologram alongside it. Fifteen tracks. Features from xaviersobased and Lucy Bedroque. The second single, "Noir Kei" — produced by kuru and seanbaby — followed shortly after.

Track six on the album. It's the kind of song that makes the album title make sense immediately. There's an aesthetic coherence to Backstage Hologram that re:wired was still building toward. This feels like kuru already knowing exactly who he is.

The production spread tells its own story. kuru produced or co-produced the majority of it himself. misogi — a London-based producer kuru has cited as a collaborator since his early days, with credits alongside Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely — handles track four. xaviersobased, the first person kuru linked up with when he was still a teenager in Discord servers, appears on "Glass." Lucy Bedroque, his deadAir labelmate and the headliner of the tour he's currently supporting, is on "End of Spring." These aren't random features. This is a project built with people kuru has known and grown alongside for years.