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The first thing you notice about tricksingh — Tirath Sandhu — is his presence. Not the self-conscious, camera-ready kind, but something more instinctive, something that pulses through his music. He stands at the intersection of worlds: Chandigarh and Toronto, Amar Singh Chamkila and A$AP Rocky, gun licenses and rap battles. A restless artist caught between cultures, between rage and restraint, between a world that demands he package himself into something digestible and his own unrelenting instinct to be “unapologetically himself.”
And then there’s the voice. It careens between languages, between textures — Punjabi’s percussive urgency meshed with English’s effortless cool. It’s loud but deliberate, a sound engineered for stadiums but made for the streets. His new EP, With All Due Disrespect, is a testament to that refusal to conform, a project that announces itself with clenched fists and a half-smirk, bristling with defiance.
It’s, as he puts it, his “love letter to rage.”
tricksingh’s lineage is storied in loss. His family has, in his words, “lost everything three generations in a row: to Partition and post-Partition, displacement.” There’s something weighty about that inheritance. But if history has taught him anything, it's how to make something out of the ruins.
He doesn’t fit into the typical 'rapper origin story'. No hustling mixtapes in parking lots, no SoundCloud come-up. Instead, music found him in fragments: cassette tapes in the backseat of his father’s car, indie gigs where people dismissed him, school annual days where he performed as Simba in The Lion King. He’s played five instruments, DJ'd, and even held a corporate job before circling back to his truest form.
“Music is the only thing I was born to do,” he says now, with the kind of certainty that only comes after almost losing it all.
He means that literally.
Last year, during a music video shoot in an abandoned factory in Bangalore, he fell 18 feet. Fractured skull, shattered cheekbone, broken nose, ACL tear. He spent a month in the ICU, snuck a phone in, and — because, of course, he did — still dropped the music video with a disclaimer:
"humans were harmed in the making of this video."
And when he woke up from the accident, the first thing he asked?
“Did we get all the shots?”
To listen to tricksingh’s music is to listen to a man caught between two worlds, oscillating between raw desi sentimentality and cutting-edge hip-hop. His work is rife with contrasts — kadhe khande sushi, kadhe bandhde chawl — trading between luxury and homegrown roots, foreign influences, and Punjabi grit.
His visuals are just as layered. In the video for 'Fucker With the Flow', he brings his 75-year-old father on screen for the first time — a man who lived through the hardship tricksingh now weaves into his music. “This frame represents legacy,” he wrote on Instagram. “The power of having a voice.”
And yet, despite how personal his music is, his fans hear themselves in it. His impromptu jam sessions — often announced with barely 24 hours’ notice — draw hundreds of people who show up not just to watch but to sing. The audience itself is part of the act.
“It’s real,” he says. “Not everything is about making money. Some things, you do just because it’s beautiful.”
With the rise of desi hip-hop, there’s been an undeniable shift in how vernacular rap is perceived — Diljit Dosanjh selling out Coachella, AP Dhillon taking over Billboard charts. But tricksingh resists categorisation.
“I wouldn’t say I’m strictly DHH,” he says. “But I would say everything I represent is hip-hop. It’s not just sonic — it’s a state of being.”
His fandom is niche but obsessive; the kind of cult following that feels intentional. He has no manager, handles his own invoices, his own branding, his own marketing. “Because if I don’t know how to do it myself, how can I trust someone else to?” He has, however, turned down brand deals, major labels, and commercial shortcuts — a conscious choice to keep his audience unpolluted. “I don’t want to sell to my audience too much. They’re here for me. Not for a sneaker collab.”
Which brings us to 'With All Due Disrespect', a three-track manifesto dripping with raw, unfiltered energy. The EP isn’t polite, it isn’t subtle, and it definitely isn’t safe. “This project gives you the power to take on the world,” he announced. “It’s my love letter to rage — and everything that comes with it.”
In 'Chaar Border Paar', he channels generations of diasporic displacement into an anthem. 'Generational' — a track brimming with dynastic defiance — frames his music as inheritance: a family tree with deep, untangled roots. And then there’s 'Fucker With the Flow' — an audacious, speaker-blasting track designed for gritted teeth and clenched fists; a middle finger to anyone who ever doubted him.
In an industry that thrives on polish, tricksingh remains defiantly unvarnished. His music is sharp-edged but never contrived; his visuals deliberate but never forced; his lyrics slicing into the culture with surgical precision. But here’s the thing about tricksingh — he’s not a moment. He’s a movement. A product of his past, but a maker of his future.
Or, as he puts it, a little more bluntly:
“I am the fucker with the flow.”
And no one can argue with that.
Follow tricksingh here.
