“I’ve been into music for as long as I can remember and loved singing even though I was never really good at it,” XAKHI aka Akhilesh Radhakrishnan tells us. He’s a 20-year old hip-hop artist from Palakkad, Kerala. His biggest inspiration has been the late Xxxtentacion and Juice Wrld. He began working on music professionally back in 2019. While he’s currently studying engineering, XAKHI wants to get a formal education in music, whether it is at an Indian music college or somewhere overseas.
His latest single – LLD (Love Laugh Death) – was release on February 14, 2021. XAKHI has collaborated with his friend San X for few of the verses and believes that the song would be incomplete without his part. He actually tells us that the song was not planned for release but tied in so well after San X stepped in that they decided to put it out there. XAKHI tells us that the song is about his struggle as an artist and the pain of heartbreak that came along that journey. In his own way, XAKHI has tied to recreate Xxxtentacion’s style in his music. You can even see it in the way he chose his stage name.
XAKHI recalls how he actually started writing when he was 17, but failed many times to write anything meaningful initially. Over a period of two years, he kept practicing and gradually reached where he is today. He usually records his music with an inexpensive setup in his bedroom. LLD was recorded over a period of a couple days and will be part of XAKHI’s new EP ‘A Collection of My Nightmares’. If given the opportunity, he’d like to work with MC Stan and the Weeknd. While he talks a lot about purple in the song, his favorite color’s actually blue! Go figure.
