Talwiinder has a bone to pick with whoever leaked his face

Until last week, it would seem improbable to talk about Miguel from Coco and Talwiinder, the skull-faced Punjabi singer who grew up in a small village near Amritsar, in the same sentence, let alone compare them. The latter, known for performing with his face painted, has become an unlikely reference point for anyone attempting a spooky Halloween look. A meme posted on Instagram imagines someone dressed as the animated character hopping into a cab, only for the driver to mistake him for the singer. It has clocked over 38k shares and laughs. Another one cuts straight to the punchline, pairing Miguel with a photograph of Talwiinder under the caption “Remember this kid? This is Talwiinder now”. Somewhere over the last couple of years, the 28-year-old’s painted face has become the benchmark against which Halloween skull makeup is measured. It’s quite an achievement for someone whose entire public persona is built around not showing his face.

When we catch up over Zoom, he’s in Mumbai, sporting his signature white paint and squeezing media appearances between performances while promoting his new EP, Paiinted Feeliings. There’s something a little unnerving about speaking to someone whose face resembles a skull; it takes a minute or two to get used to, particularly when he laughs. The thing is, unlike his masked look, Talwiinder himself is quite warm and gentle in conversation.

He takes his time to answer questions, often pauses to gather his thoughts rather than rushing to fill the silence. Asked what inspires him these days, he chuckles, “It’s more pressure than inspiration, to be honest. I have so much stuff to finish. My inspiration is to finish all the songs I’ve started.” At a time when everyone seems to be talking about slowing down and escaping hustle culture, Talwiinder appears to have missed the memo. When I ask whether he’s worried about burning out, he brushes off the suggestion: “I’m looking for somebody who can outwork me.”

Born Talwinder Singh Sidhu, he began experimenting with music around 2015 and started releasing tracks in 2018. His Punjabi-led sound draws from hip-hop, R&B, and electronic music, with influences ranging from lo-fi and trap to drill and synth-pop. Tracks such as ‘Gaah’, ‘Gallan 4’ and ‘Dhundhala’ helped him find an audience beyond the Punjabi music circuit, while collaborations such as ‘Wishes’ with Hasan Raheem took him further. But his first taste of performing came much earlier.

Growing up in Tarn Taran near Amritsar, he first experienced validation for his singing in second grade. “My teachers pushed me to participate in a school function because nobody else had volunteered. They said, ‘You’re kind of decent, you should do it.’ I sang a religious track by Ravinder Grewal and ended up receiving a lot of compliments. As they say, I didn’t choose this life; this life chose me,” he says.

By the time he was in middle school, his family moved to California. While the idea of joining a garage band might have been straight out of an American coming-of-age film, he wasn’t quite ready for that. “I first needed to learn how to communicate in English,” he says, laughing. These days, you wouldn’t necessarily guess he once struggled with the language. His English carries a distinctly American lilt. But when he slips into Hindi, his accent is unmistakably Indian. 

As he found his feet in a new country, he continued recording himself on his phone and uploading videos to Instagram but didn’t have access to a proper studio. An open-mic night at a coffee shop in the mid 2010s eventually brought him to sound engineer Pushkahlon, who invited him to experiment in his garage studio. “The next day I was at his house and we started experimenting.”

The face paint came much later, and the decision was seemingly uncomplicated. “Nobody was doing it. So, I thought, why not? Let’s take a different route,” he tells me. “I believe each artist should have their own individuality, originality.” He was also excited by the prospect of hiding his face and living “that double life”. Musicians performing under pseudonyms are hardly unusual in India, but those who go as far as concealing their faces are a much smaller club. And among them, Talwiinder has arguably become the country’s most recognisable.

Of course, the idea of musicians building an identity around anonymity isn’t entirely new. Daft Punk’s helmets, Marshmello’s white headpiece, Gorillaz’s animated characters, and Glass Beams’ bedazzled face masks have all become as recognisable as their music itself.

Talwiinder’s version is more involved. His skull is painstakingly painted onto his face, with the makeup artists who have worked with him since the beginning now taking about an hour to complete the look, down from the two or three hours it once required. He wears it for music videos, performances, and even interviews. The mask, he explains, isn’t a prerequisite for making music. “I started creating the art before the mask came. The mask is just for me when I have to go into the external world, in front of other people. Talwiinder only comes alive on those days,” he says. On other days, he gets to be himself.

Keeping those two lives apart takes some vigilance. He has a close circle of people he trusts, but there have been occasions when strangers have tried sneaking photographs. “I can tell exactly when somebody is reaching for their phone or even if their camera is just facing me.” Earlier this year, an unmasked video of him at Nupur Sanon and Stebin Ben’s wedding began circulating online. When I bring it up, his response comes with an edge of irritation, though there’s a sense of hurt beneath it too. “First of all, that video is not really in HD. Whoever recorded that got a really shitty phone.” Most of his fans, he agrees, were supportive, but creators repeatedly reposting the footage for views and likes were another matter. “I have a little hint about who might have done it, but I’m going to save that mystery for a little longer. I just want to tell them that I’m coming for you.” He delivers the warning deadpan, before breaking into laughter. Asked whether he might reveal his face on his own terms someday, he simply says, “Yeah, let’s see what happens.”

His fans don’t just protect his anonymity, they also find ways to keep his music alive. The title of his latest EP, Paiinted Feeliings (the double I’s being a nod to the spelling of his stage name, Talwiinder, as well as a play on his dual personality), for instance, came from a fan. “The moment I saw that [EP name suggestion], I knew that was the name of my next project.” The four-track EP began rolling out in September, with ‘Assay Passay’ and ‘Mangda Wapis Kyun’, before ‘Geet’ and ‘Jind Meri’ completed the quartet on October 30. The songs explore different shades of love, longing, and emotion. “They’re going to hear stuff that they’ve never heard before, but the real magic is going to happen when they see me perform live.”

He didn’t set out to be a peacemaker, but his collaborations have also taken him into territory where music and politics often collide. Working with Pakistani artists, including Hasan Raheem on ‘Wishes’ and Afusic and Ali Soomro on ‘Pal Pal’, has earned him some detractors. When some of these songs became harder to access on Indian streaming platforms (while ‘Pal Pal’ has since returned to Spotify India, ‘Wishes’ remains unavailable), listeners found their own workarounds, with fans even uploading tracks as podcast episodes so they could continue listening. Despite this, he joined Raheem on stage earlier this year at his sold-out Toronto concert to perform ‘Wishes’ live for the first time and addressed the restriction, an appearance that drew severe backlash online.

Does censorship or backlash make him more cautious about whom he works with? Talwiinder doesn’t seem interested in letting either dictate his creative choices. “You should make music that feels right to you, work with artists that feel right to you, and the music will find you. I really have to see that the kind of love my community gives me, their community is also giving. So, it makes sense to bring communities together that have the same vibrations.” It’s a clear position.

He’s also quite opinionated about another subject currently dividing creative circles—artificial intelligence. While many musicians are wary of AI encroaching on the creative process, Talwiinder draws a distinction between using it to make music and using it to realise a visual idea. “[There are] a lot of lazy artists. A lot of AI artists,” he says. Using AI to make music, production or vocals is “very low” in his books. But using it to build a visual world is another matter. “Use AI smartly. I really love AI in my visuals. In my music videos, I use it to expand, make it bigger than what it is, to show people something that’s a little outside of this world. Because you’re not a director, you’re a singer. Use it to express your vision, your imagination.”

Most of his music is made late at night, when “the world is sleeping” and there is “so much more quiet and peace”. His preferred company is peppermint green tea with honey and ginger. Away from the studio, there’s badminton, frisbee, volleyball and, more recently, experimenting with kettlebells. Going seven or 10 days without making music leaves him frustrated. “There’s irritation. There’s something inside of me that just needs to come out.”

With the next project already taking shape, I ask if he’ll give me a little preview. He offers a rather cryptic distinction between the two, “There’s feelings in this one, and there’s emotions in the next one.” We’ll have to wait and see what that means. Asked how he manages to switch off between projects, he has a simpler prescription: “My break is me just getting 12-plus hours of sleep.”