With AP Dhillon, attention to detail shows up in small, specific moments and on a hot day in Singapore, we begin to see what that looks like.
We’re in the colour-charged, busy lanes of Bugis Street, where the artist is posing against a wall with vivid posters layered over time, giving the photographer clean bursts of frames before turning to him with a grin.
“You’re going to hate me,” he warns, pulling out a chapstick and smearing it across the lens, bending the frame to his liking.
This isn’t a one-off. There are a handful of moments during the Esquire India cover shoot where Dhillon offers input, each one politely disarmed with a ‘Can I suggest something?’ before he steps in. He’s particular about what he wants, and that same instinct carries into the way he talks about his personal style too; be it through the colour of a vest that may only reveal itself in passing or through a belt that sits purposely undone on a trench coat.
“Whoever I work with, it’s a two-way street. I’m teaching them what I like, what I don’t like,” he says with a voice that’s low, steady and carries itself with ease. “From photos to styling to even reading things. I’m quite hands-on.”
For Dhillon, it’s less about control than clarity. “If you know what you want, people don’t have to guess,” he explains, with a cheeky smile.
His approach has become more defined with exposure and experience. “From the very moment I put my first record out, I wanted my art to take the lead over anything else,” he tells me.
Since his breakout with "Brown Munde" in 2020, the Indo-Canadian rapper, songwriter and record producer has seen an uninterrupted rise. On Spotify alone, he reaches over 16 million monthly listeners and has built a following of more than 10 million, with his music regularly circulating through playlists that carry him well beyond his core Punjabi audience. Chances are you’ve encountered his music at some point whether it’s drifting out of a car at a red light, hijacking a playlist at a party or even blasting through someone’s earphones as they pass you by. His ascent has also seen him become the first India-born artist of Punjabi lineage to join the roster of Republic Records, placing him alongside global names like Drake, The Weeknd and Post Malone.
Yet for Dhillon, success has never been the point. Maintaining a clear sense of direction in his work has always mattered more. It’s one of the reasons he has been vocal about avoiding Bollywood, calling out the exploitative practices in an interview with Simranjot Singh Makkar. I point out how firmly he has remained committed to doing things on his own terms and ask him why that was important.
For the longest time, he explains, success in India followed a fixed script. The standard checklist was to graduate from regional music and get a film record. Only then were you considered successful.
“I started doing music independently because not many people believed in me,” he says, referring to Run Up records, which he cofounded along with Gurinder Gill, Shinda Kahlon and Gminxr back in 2019.
Dhillon has no regrets about going indie. “If they didn’t believe in me, they didn’t,” he says. The musician would go on to release chart-toppers like “Summer High”, “Dil Nu” (2022), “With You” (2023) under the label. More importantly, the experience strengthened a conviction he still carries today. “That taught me how important it is to make your art the way you want to make it and not rely on anyone else. So, I never worked with Bollywood or any film, because they wanted ownership of the record,” he says.
The idea that someone could claim ownership of his work simply because they were a bigger name never sat right with him. “Someone else shouldn’t dictate what you should be doing. Unless you’re making a record for a specific project that you want to be part of, that’s totally different,” he argues.
He also gets candid about the machinery still at play in the music business: stream manipulation, money-heavy marketing and the belief that if something is pushed hard enough, audiences will eventually buy into it. In that context, ownership becomes a creative safeguard.
That decision may not have made Dhillon popular with labels, but it arrived at a moment when more artists were beginning to question long-held assumptions about independence and control. “All it takes is one person to do it. And then everybody says okay, this is possible,” he says, with a shrug.
AT THE TIME OF THE COVER SHOOT, Dhillon is in Singapore filming a music video. Working to a packed schedule, he’s impressed by the city’s seamless connectivity. “Singapore is easy to get around, which I liked. You don’t travel far and it already feels different,” he says, adding, “We didn’t really have time to be tourists, so most of what I saw was during the shoot.
It was enough to get a sense of the city’s dynamic vibrancy. Dhillon’s music video takes viewers through the lush greenery of Fort Canning, the busy street markets of Chinatown and the colourful lanes of Haji Lane. For Esquire India, he also poses at the Padang Deck of National Gallery Singapore, whose sweeping skyline views complement its world-renowned collection of modern Southeast Asian art.
“Every neighbourhood had its own character,” he recalls. “You’d be in one part, and it felt totally different a few minutes away. That’s the thing that stuck with me. So many different cultures and so much good food in one place. There’s a lot going on for how modern it looks.”
Though largely on the clock, he still found time to indulge one passion. “I drove about thirty minutes out to buy some golf gear and got to hit a few on the driving range,” he says. “I wanted to play a round at Sentosa, which I hear is one of the nicest courses out there, but didn’t have the time. Next time. The food was great too. So many options.
There’s no rest for the wickedly talented, and as the cover shoot wraps, I’m told the interview with Dhillon can continue en route to Changi Airport, since he’s flying out in the latter half of the day. The air is filled with a mix of exhaustion and anticipation. His manager rides shotgun with the driver, and seated beside the star in the backseat, I find myself wondering whether music always felt inevitable for him.
I ask what life might have looked like in an alternate universe where he never became a musician.
He takes a long pause to think, and I throw basketball into the mix, recalling that he played growing up. That’s when I learn the dream faded once he realised his village in Gurdaspur, Punjab didn’t have the infrastructure to support it.
“If you want to get into sports these days, you have to start at day one,” he muses. “You have to have the best coaches, the best techniques, which we were missing in Punjab.”
Still, basketball stayed with him for a while. “I loved playing growing up. It was kind of therapeutic too,” he recalls, recommending everyone play at least one sport in their lives.
Long before success found him, music did. His earliest memories slide across geography and genre—from Punjabi greats like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jagjit Singh, Jazzy B and Bohemia to Western names like Linkin Park, Snoop Dogg and Enrique Iglesias.
When I press him further, he lands on a memory that includes his father. “I almost forgot about this. Back in the day, I used to listen to a lot of Punjabi radio. It was fun, and you know those shows where you had to call in to get your record played, but it never f**king happened? You had to call in advance; it was never live. My dad, my sister and I would try sometimes but it never worked. Maybe it worked once. They used to pretend it was live and I was just too naive to know,” he fondly recalls.
Those early moments of listening and waiting—long before he moved to Vancouver, Canada in 2015, where he later earned a diploma in Business Administration and Management after completing a Civil Engineering degree in India—feel disarmingly simple in hindsight.
When the conversation turns to how he makes music now, the answer feels almost unchanged in spirit. “There’s no fixed process,” he says. Sometimes it begins with a beat, sometimes a moment. “You see what stands out and you ride it,” he adds.
It tracks. His musical arc resists neat categorisation, living somewhere in between the diaspora hustle and emotional reckoning. It moves from the immigrant ambition and cultural arrival of “Brown Munde,” “Insane” and “Majhail,” to the more inward turns of “Excuses,” “Dil Nu” and “With You.”
Though the bravado fuels the hype, it’s really the melancholy with its softer, more romantic undercurrent that stays with you. That’s the version fans return to, replaying it on loop, and the one that has come to shape how he’s often seen.
For a man who sings so longingly of love, the question is simple: does he believe in it? And can it coexist with the life he leads, with long stretches on the road, constant travel and time spent away from home?
He smiles, half-amused. “In music, yes. In real life, it’s hard,” he says. Love, he adds, doesn’t always have to mean the romantic kind; it can be family, a pet or even work itself. Relationships, however, the two-way kind, are where it gets complicated. He trails off, then breaks into a cheeky smile. One that neatly dodges the question, while saying enough for us to move on.
If there is one relationship that has remained a constant through it all, it is his barber, Maurice “Mocutz.” I float a theory I’ve recently become convinced of: men will change their cities, careers, even their entire lives, but almost never their barbers. In my pre-interview rabbit hole while researching, I discovered that Mocutz had been cutting his hair long before Amritpal became AP.
Which raises the obvious question—what does Maurice know that the rest of us don’t? Dhillon laughs before I can finish. “That is a comfort space, right? You go there, you chill, you talk. You’re not worried you’re going to walk out looking like a completely different person.” A good barber, he explains, already knows your face, your hair, your beard and your style. There’s no anxiety, no trust exercises. “When you work with someone new, it takes a few sessions for them to get to know you, and those few sessions can be hard.” With Maurice, it seems the haircut is almost secondary. “You go to bullshit more than getting a haircut,” he says. “You already know you’re going to get a good one… almost always. But sometimes Maurice f**ks it up too, but very rarely,” he adds with a grin.
DHILLON’S FAME WASN’T GRADUAL. ONE moment he was emerging and the next, he was everywhere. It almost makes you wonder if the shy kid from his early years ever imagines a life that moves this fast. When fame arrives at this speed, it has a way of consuming everything around it. But Dhillon doesn’t appear wired that way.
Earlier in the day, at the Padang Deck at National Gallery Singapore, he had stepped onto the set against the skyline. As the photographer took the initial burst of shots, a small crowd gathered around the tethered screen. When his manager asked if he wanted to glance at the photos, Dhillon responded with a half-smile, gently shaking his head and signalling he’d rather not. We shot some more and moved to another spot. He looked away, allowing us to capture a quiet profile and turned to us for feedback. When I said, “Looking away from the camera is nice too,” he jumped in with “Thank God!” and laughed in visible relief. It’s a rare contradiction to belong to an industry obsessed with watching itself and yet be most at ease while doing the opposite.
I’ve spent less than 24 hours with him, but it’s just enough time for me to grasp the grind that turns Amritpal Singh Dhillon into AP Dhillon. Shaped by clarity about his work but also maintaining a distance from the spectacle around it.
That he is guided less by image than by intent becomes evident when I realise, somewhat surprisingly, that at the shoot, he doesn’t need a hair and make-up team. In an industry built on polish, filters and faces that rarely exist in daylight, it feels mischievously intentional. It’s rare, especially for an artist whose career runs as much on image as it does on sound. “It is a conscious choice,” he says, before unpacking it. “When you look at Instagram, records, movies, everything is going towards this idea of perfection. A hundred percent perfect faces. That’s why people use face apps and all that. But you don’t find these people on the street. They don’t exist.”
What bothers him isn’t so much the aesthetics, but the fiction behind it. The smoother the image, the less human it becomes. “The best part about yourself whether it’s art or how you look, is your imperfections. That’s what makes you unique. Why would I try to hide it? Just own it.” He pauses, and lands on an analogy, “Soldiers are proud of their war scars. Not that I have war scars,” he quickly adds, with a smile.
The point still lands. For him, flaws aren’t something to fix or filter out, they’re proof of being real. In a culture obsessed with airbrushed reality, he’d rather leave the smudges. Both in real life and on the lens.
It’s a perspective that carries into his work too. Even with a hugely successful 2025 tour and the momentum of “Thodi Si Daaru”, in collaboration with Shreya Ghoshal, the run of hits has been more sporadic since his 2023 album Since Two Hearts Never Break the Same.
“The only way to grow is to learn from your losses,” he says when asked about how he deals with setbacks. There’s no grand formula or secret blueprint to it. “The only real trick is to keep doing what you believe in, do it damn well, and not give up halfway through. Hopefully it works and if for some reason it doesn’t, you learn to live with that too.”
He draws another analogy, from his much-loved sport, basketball, explaining how a team game teaches you the important lesson of how to take a loss. “You learn how to be a team player and what your role in the team is. From there, you learn about yourself. Are you the guy controlling the game or are you the guy playing defence?” he says, speaking about losing with the same importance as winning.
For a moment, his answer feels oddly revealing. Even in an alternate universe, it sounds like Dhillon would’ve still found his way to discipline, rhythm, teamwork and repetition—mechanics of performance, just in a different arena.
HARD AS IT MAY BE TO BELIEVE, THERE ARE times when Amritpal forgets his AP side. “There’s so much happening in life,” he ruminates. “So, when I visit India or certain places in the world, and people are running towards me, I realise I need to get back in. I forget…I forget about it all the time” he admits.
When he does step into the persona of AP Dhillon, something changes. “You’ve got to watch everything because when you have the power to influence people, you just want to do it the right way. But at the end of the day, we’re human beings. We know what we know and we’re a product of our environment,” he says, suggesting that mistakes happen but the important thing is to correct course and use that influence responsibly. He talks about responsibility and knowing that people are watching, young fans are absorbing what you project, and that actions ripple beyond just yourself. There’s also a protective instinct towards his team, friends and family. Each decision is considered not just for how it affects him but for how it might affect others. Privacy, he explains, is non-negotiable, given the consequences it carries.
Success, for him, is a moving target. “Success and having a perfect life is very subjective. I learned that along the way,” he says. “Some people are happy with what they have and where they are in life; there’s nothing wrong with that. And some people want more; there’s nothing wrong with that either.
He doesn’t buy into the idea that more money or talent can necessarily make someone a better human. In his mind, success and character have very little to do with each other, and he is still learning to reconcile success with contentment.
He talks about doing better and getting bigger, but also about learning to sit with what he’s already achieved without constantly scanning the room for who’s doing more. Comparison, he suggests, can be a slippery slope. “Someone might be doing better than you; someone might be doing worse. That’s their journey. You’ve just got to be happy with what you have,” he concludes.
Dhillon knows what life without privilege looks like. He has spoken before about arriving in Canada as a student with nowhere to stay and working a string of jobs to support himself while studying. And yet, when he describes fame, it’s as both a privilege and a sacrifice.
Most people, he believes, only see the privilege. Fame brings freedom, financial stability, control over choices and the ability to walk away if you want to. And then there’s also the love and becoming part of people’s lives in ways that money just can’t buy and that, he admits, is special.
But he also speaks about the flip side, one that’s far less glamorous. When the schedule spirals, time with friends and family becomes collateral damage. “While you’re growing, everyone else is growing older,” he says. “You can’t always make up for lost time."
Stopping doesn’t feel like an option when you can still see how far you could go and how much more you could do.
He speaks about the emotional whiplash that comes with pride in what he’s built and awareness of what it has cost. Fame also has a way of thinning your inner circle—friendships fall away and intentions get murky. “More money, more fame, more problems. You don’t know who’s coming at you with what intention,” he says. “You’re no longer afforded the luxury of being anonymous, careless or ‘dumb’ in public.”
He’s grateful for how much fame has given him, but it has taken away just as much. Whether it balances out or not is still up for debate.
Dhillon talks with the kind of conviction that makes you curious to see what he’ll do next, whether you’re fully sold on him or not. I ask him what lies ahead, both on the professional and personal front.
The answer isn’t neatly packaged. He admits he doesn’t really know where he’s headed. The space is riddled with politics and pressure, and instead of forcing momentum, he’s trying to loosen his grip, experiment a little and step sideways. He would like to try other verticals and other forms of expression, before hopefully circling back to music. “Besides music?” I ask. He casually mentions he’s been writing scripts, for films perhaps. Just testing the waters, feeling out a new language, without the urgency to label it or turn it into the next headline.
On a personal note, the uncertainty is more grounding. He wants a home base. “Because I feel like I’m just all over the place. And secondly, I want to slow down a bit,” he mentions, adding that years of working day and night have caught up with him, and burnout feels uncomfortably close. He’s well aware that if you run too fast for too long, you miss things. Perspective blurs. So the priorities are simple, it’s mental health, physical health, time with his parents, that’s it.
At the airport, he’s done checking in, which means my time is up. Somewhere between schedules and goodbyes I get a sense that home for now is a fluid concept and rest isn’t on the horizon just yet. There is a place though that he hints at escaping to from time to time. It’s warm enough for bare legs, the days are slower and no one knows him there. That’s precisely the appeal. There’s an ease to his tone as he describes it and the now familiar grin. We part ways soon after. As I walk out of the airport, I’m still thinking about Amritpal and AP, how easily he moves between the two, and how deliberately he seems to hold them apart. The scale, the schedule and the spectacle define one. The other seems more fixed on something simpler: time off the clock, nothing to answer to, the rare luxury of being entirely himself.
Credits
Chairperson: Avarna Jain
CEO: Debashish Ghosh
Editor: Rahul Gangwani
Creative Direction & Styling: Vijendra Bhardwaj
Editorial Mentor: Saira Menezes
Managing Editor: Sonal Nerurkar
Deputy Editor: Mayukh Majumdar
Photography: Taras Taraporvala
Styling: Nikita Jaisinghani
Words & Creative Direction: Komal Shetty
Photographer's Assistant: Mitesh Mirchandani
Producer: Manju Balakrishan
Production Team: Menaka Krishnan, Deborah, Chirta Devi and Nisha
Digital Editor: Saurav Bhanot
Features Editor: Nitin Sreedhar
Junior Fashion Editor: Komal Shetty
Head of Copy Desk: Prannay Pathak
Senior Features Writer: Jeena J Billimoria
Digital Writers: Abhya Adlakha, Aditi Tarafdar, Rudra Mulmule,
Senior Social Media Executive: Riti Ghai
Social Media Executive: Kashish Mishra
Bookings Editor: Varun Shah;
Locations: NATIONAL GALLERY SINGAPORE, NG TENG FONG ROOF GARDEN, ROOF GARDEN TEMPLE BY TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN, AND BUGIS STREET
Destination Partner: SINGAPORE TOURISM BOARD
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