Anish Kumar

Washington to Cambridge, by way of GarageBand

Anish Kumar grew up in Washington, in the North East of England, and started making music at home on GarageBand by trying to rebuild Eminem beats from the inside out. He moved to Logic as the ambition outgrew the software. The teenage listening was Eminem and Avicii; by his late teens it had shifted towards Four Tet and Bicep, the two reference points he still names most readily. Interviewed in July 2022, aged 22, he described the lockdown period as the point he fell properly into sample-heavy records — disco and northern soul in particular — which is the seam he has worked ever since.

He did all of this while reading veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge, playing Pembroke bops in the same years he was sitting the course. He has been consistent about keeping the two apart rather than reconciling them: the veterinary side is, in his words, "something completely distinct from music; music is something I always have bubbling away, a very night time thing". Asked by Varsity about the split, he put it down to temperament — he cannot focus on one sole thing — and described his aim in the studio as making music accessible without compromising too much. Travel feeds the record collection too; he has pointed to trips abroad, Sri Lanka among them, and to Madlib as the producer he measures himself against. He is now based in London.

A Brenda Lee sample and a shelved demo

The first record that travelled was "Little Miss Dynamite", built on a Brenda Lee sample and premiered on BBC Radio 1 in May 2021. The premiere had been pushed back once — the original slot was lost to the coverage following the death of Prince Philip — before it landed on Annie Mac's show. His debut EP, Postcards, followed on 29 July 2022: four tracks, "Hummingbird", "Steamroller", "Bhavachakra" and "Return To Sender", which he was careful to frame as deliberately incoherent. "It's not meant to be a cohesive release," he said at the time. "These are postcards from different parts of my musical influences."

The track that changed his bookings was "Blackpool Boulevard", a piano-house record made with Barry Can't Swim and released through Ninja Tune. It began as a 2019 idea Kumar shelved as a demo; Barry Can't Swim heard it after the two connected online over each other's music, and the finished version — northern soul filtered through cinematic piano chords — picked up play from Pete Tong and Danny Howard before reaching the Radio 1 playlist. It remains his most-streamed track. On 13 August 2022 he played Four Tet's Finsbury Park all-dayer on the Dialled In stage, closing a loop, since Four Tet had already aired one of his tracks from the BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury. A debut mixtape, A Mixtape by Anish Kumar, arrived in August 2023, carrying "Care About Me" and a video shot in Cambridge; a more pop-leaning single, "Ringtone", came out of the same stretch.

AK Cuts, and the reason for it

On 15 October 2025 Kumar published a note explaining what he was about to start. There was a gap between what he produced and what he played out, and AK Cuts was the fix: a dancefloor anthology in four volumes, each one a snapshot of a studio period, with the series running alongside the rest of his output the way Étienne de Crécy's Super Discount records did. His own phrasing was that the project "gave me the license to paint a much wider picture and finally unite the two arms of what I do".

Volume 1 landed on 31 October 2025 through Platoon — six tracks, led by "Yes, Honey?" with "Paging N.Y.C." as the B-side, and pitched as a set of nods to New York house culture. Volume 2 turned to Indian sample flips, including Bollywood vocal sources. Volume 3 went to Italo-disco. Volume 4 closed the run on 1 July 2026: four tracks and fourteen minutes — "Time is Running Out", "Freestyle Battle Weapon", "Hustle and Opulence in America" and "Bounty Hunter" — pulling in American jazz and spaghetti western soundtracks alongside hip-hop and house. Across all four volumes the method holds: short loops in the French house tradition, samples passing in procession rather than developing, and a dusty finish instead of a polished club one. The same team ran through the whole series — artwork by Raman Uppal, mixes by Jas Shaw, mastering by U.P. Mix & Master.

AK Cuts: Greatest Hits followed on 11 September 2026, eight tracks with two lifted from each volume, pressed to vinyl. It is the series summarising itself rather than a new record, and it is the most recent release under his name.

The rooms he has taken, 2025 to 2026

Kumar's live progress has been measured in rooms more than in tours. He sold out Village Underground in London on 1 November 2025, and made his Panorama Bar debut in Berlin on 12 April 2026. The festival dates either side of those are documented: Royale in Boston on 15 April 2025 and Terminal 5 in New York three days later; MEO Kalorama in Lisbon on 21 June 2025; a 1am set at Worthy Farm for Glastonbury on 27 June 2025; Bergtattfestivalen in Norway on 3 July 2025; Radio 1's Big Weekend at Herrington Country Park, close to where he grew up, on 22 May 2026; Field Day at Brockwell Park the following night; the Jazz Cafe Festival in Burgess Park on 2 August 2026; and Way Out West in Gothenburg on 14 August 2026.

The centrepiece was a four-Friday residency at Phonox in Brixton through October 2026, which let him programme rather than guest. He opened on 2 October with Baalti, took 9 October with Wallace, brought Dar Disku and DJ Subaru in on 16 October, and closed on 23 October on his own, all night long — a set of roughly five hours.

Where he stands now

As of early November 2026 the diary is a support run rather than a headline tour. He plays Depot Mayfield in Manchester on 21 November 2026 on a multi-act bill topped by The Avalanches, with Peggy Gou and Four Tet also listed, then joins Bonobo's Distance In Static dates across North America: First Avenue in Minneapolis on 24 November, History in Toronto on 26 November, MTELUS in Montreal on 27 November, Citizens House of Blues in Boston on 28 November, the State Theatre in Portland, Maine on 1 December, the Fillmore Silver Spring on 3 December, and Knockdown Center in Queens on 5 December. Further out, he is billed at Brick Lane Jazz Festival in London across 22–25 April 2027, alongside Emma-Jean Thackray and MRCY.

The recorded side is at a natural pause — the anthology is finished and compiled, with nothing announced to follow it — so what has kept him audible is radio. On 2 August 2026 he recorded an hour for triple j's Mix Up in Australia, running Bollywood edits into Italo and loose disco and carrying five of his own productions, one of them unreleased. It is the clearest public read on what he is actually playing at the moment.