Thirty-four floors above a rain-soaked Mumbai, Prateek Kuhad is surprisingly unassuming. He invites Esquire India to his hotel room in a white T-shirt, brown trousers, hotel slippers. A close friend has flown in to join him before an intimate listening session with fans in Mumbai before the hitmaker of 'Kasoor' and 'Cold/mess'.
But the real companion throughout our conversation is his iPhone's Notes app—the place where half-finished lyrics, album titles and fleeting thoughts wait to become songs.
When conversation turns to Full Moon Chamber, Kuhad who is currently reading Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki unlocks his phone to show a list of nearly 50 album titles he considered before finalising on Full Moon. There are names he's happy to leave behind including Silver Sheets, borrowed from a line in 'Blush', Sunlight Someone, and a handful of others that never made the cut.
The title that survived came from a teasing observation. Someone close to him joked that he needed a "full moon chamber" because he became noticeably different whenever the moon was full or a lunar event. He admits initially he did not agree with the observation. However, "once I started noticing it, I was like, yeah I'm definitely a little bit like off," he says.
"Not in a good or a bad way, but just like everything's heightened. I would be like a little hyper."
Whether that's astrology or coincidence is beside the point. The phrase lingered long after most of the songs had already been written, eventually becoming the emotional umbrella under which the album now sits.
The record itself wasn't conceived around a grand idea. Like much of Kuhad's work, it revealed itself only after months of writing.
"Usually I don't really plan my albums in that sense," he says. "I just tend to write a lot and then something emerges."
Full Moon Chamber, his latest and third full-length with 14 tracks, builds on that instinctive approach. The album moves between stripped-back acoustic writing and fuller, studio-shaped arrangements, with production contributions from Brandon Shoop, Nick Ruth and other collaborators. Across its runtime, Kuhad threads together songs that explore emotional volatility, intimacy, and transition.
It includes previously released singles alongside newer material, with tracks like "Blush", "Oh Camille", and "Moonlight Serenade" sitting alongside newer compositions that expand his sonic palette without abandoning his signature lyrical restraint.
Those songs emerged across Los Angeles and New York through 2023 and 2024, a period that also coincided with Kuhad making Los Angeles his second home. Having studied in New York years earlier, he initially resisted LA's sprawling geography and car-dependent culture. Today, he calls it home, but more importantly, the city changed the way he approached songwriting.
"I wanted to work with producers," the 36 years old says. "I wanted to write more in a studio setting with other people instead of just at home alone on my guitar."
For someone who admits, "I prefer writing alone," the decision was to challenge the creative comfort. Many of the songs, Kuhad shares are written with the piano and away from the guitar.
"I was trying to deliberately push myself out of my comfort zone... I kind of wanted to do the opposite and not write alone at all."
The experiment reshaped songs in unexpected ways. "Blush", first written in a Nepal hotel room on an acoustic guitar, was later rebuilt almost from scratch with producer Brandon Shoop. The lyrics remained untouched, but the melody, guitar work, and harmonic structure changed so dramatically that Kuhad admits he would never have arrived there by himself. However, other songs, such as "Oh Camille" and "Moonlight Serenade", remained closer to his traditional writing process.
"I was like okay let me do something I'm not used to doing and hopefully that'll push me to do something new."
But if there's one thing Kuhad refuses to compromise on, it's authenticity. He describes himself as "very particular and almost like puristic" about songwriting, a mindset that extends even to language. Despite growing up on many Bollywood songs that freely switched between Hindi and English, and being a bilingual musician, he has never mixed the two within a single composition.
"It feels inauthentic... it feels wrong," he says. "I also don't like doing things for the sake of it."
That pursuit of honesty extends beyond language and into love itself—the emotional terrain that has long defined his catalogue. While earlier records often lingered in heartbreak and uncertainty, Full Moon Chamber quietly moves somewhere more settled.
"I think only recently for the first time I've been in something which is not like that," he says. "That's kind of why the album starts with that anguish but ends in a more settled place."
Even his relationship with vinyl is less romantic than one might expect. Though the new album is available on the format and his shelves include Elliott Smith, Pink Floyd, old blues records and vintage Bollywood albums, he avoids listening to music while writing.
"I don't want to listen to music because I feel like it can influence me too much. You don't want to be influenced by one song. You want to be influenced by a large number of songs so that it's more innovative."
The next creative frontier, however, isn't another record.
Soon, Kuhad will make his acting debut in Drowning, a crime thriller announced earlier this year. The project came through friends in Los Angeles and without any auditions. Interestingly, he admits the idea wasn't entirely unexpected. A few years ago, he enrolled in a month-long workshop at New York's Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute simply to explore another art form. His family, meanwhile, found out about his upcoming acting debut only when the announcement went live this week.
"My family is definitely (surprised), I didn't actually tell anybody. I mean, it was just kind of in the works for so long. I don't like talk about stuff till it's going to form. And then suddenly everything moved in the last month. And so even my family was like, 'what the hell!'.
The singer-songwriter will make his feature film acting debut in Drowning, Dar Gai's upcoming crime thriller, where he plays an independent musician caught in the grip of a criminal record label boss. While the role mirrors his profession, Kuhad insists the similarities end there.
"I've never done anything criminal," he laughs. "Maybe ran a red light once." The project, currently in pre-production is said to be shot in Delhi and much of the details are currently under wraps. The film may mark a new chapter, but Kuhad isn't in a hurry to define what comes next.
"It's impossible to predict future. It's better to be hopeful than not," he concludes.