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The profile · researched 19 September 2026
Kuru, the Rockville teenager who built an electronic rap sound in a bedroom and now sells out Europe
Keegan Foley started making music at 14 in a Maryland bedroom during lockdown; on 17 April 2026 they released a second album that Pitchfork scored 7.3, and they spend this autumn on a European run that opens in London on 25 September.
Maryland, Indonesia, Queens
Kuru is Keegan Foley, born on 14 November 2005 in Montgomery County, Maryland, and raised in Rockville with a childhood split between Maryland and Indonesia. The music started at 14, in the first year of the pandemic, after hearing a track by the producer Demxntia and realising the whole thing could be made from a bedroom without anyone's permission. Early material went straight to SoundCloud.
The first release with a proper title was the EP Splitting Time on 18 February 2022, the same year Foley finished high school. A spell at college in Nashville followed and did not take; the recording setup was unfamiliar and the work suffered for it. Foley has since lived in Queens, near Jackson Heights, for close to three years, and that move shows up in the music as much as any gear change.
The scene around them is a network of collectives rather than a single crew: TooManyStrikers on the DMV rap side, Helix Tears, Graveem1nd, and previously Novagang. The connection to TooManyStrikers came through SJ during lockdown and widened out to Migo Lee, twentythree and Jaeychino, whose influence Foley credits for tightening the flows and the vocal takes.
Three records in nineteen months
The debut album Re:Wired arrived on 8 November 2024 through DeadAir Records, made while Foley's life was, by their own account, a mess — a record that carried the aftermath of the pandemic and a bleak run of thinking that they later summed up as a 'shit, we're doomed' mentality.
The mixtape Stay True Forever followed on 23 May 2025 and functioned as the loosening-up between the two albums. Across that stretch the collaborator list filled out with Lucy Bedroque, Xaviersobased, katmoji and Dazegxd — names that recur on the album that came next and on the tours that carry it.
DeadAir has remained the home label throughout, and the release cadence is quick by the standards of guitar bands but ordinary for a scene that grew up on upload buttons.
Backstage Hologram
Backstage Hologram came out on 17 April 2026: 15 tracks, 39 minutes and 17 seconds, with features from Lucy Bedroque on 'End of Spring', katmoji on 'Like Glue' and Xaviersobased on 'Glass'. The singles were 'FW19' on 20 March 2026 and 'Noir Kei' on 8 April 2026. The production credits run to roughly eighteen names including Foley, among them Syzy, MISOGI, Maneru and 444jet — a record built by committee and still recognisably one voice.
Foley has described 'FW19' as the track that needed the most re-recording, bar by bar, and 'Like Glue' as the hardest to finish because of the instrumentation and the vocal mix. One odd inheritance: 'End of Spring' and 'Noir Kei' share a melody pulled from the same 2022 laptop file.
Pitchfork gave it 7.3, with Jude Noel picking out the polish of the production and the distinctiveness of the voice on top of it. The Daily of the University of Washington went at the sound itself — atmospheric pads, muted snares, hard 808s and light, skittering hi-hats. It is the record where Foley sounds settled rather than braced.
Not digicore
Foley has spent much of 2026 arguing with the word attached to them. Speaking to The FADER in an interview published on 7 July 2026 and conducted in late May, they said the digicore tag 'just doesn't suit me as a descriptor', and pointed instead at Japanese pop and electronic music — Perfume, Capsule, Hikaru Utada — as the actual source material, rather than a set of internet aesthetics that hardened around 2022.
What Backstage Hologram mixes, on that reading, is jerk rap, J-pop, DMV hip-hop and electronic production, with rap as the load-bearing element. It is why the act gets filed under dance and electronic on ticketing sites while the records are built on verses. The visual side leans on Japanese visual kei as much as on anything from the SoundCloud years.
Foley is non-binary, and the collaborations that define the current phase are friendships first: the point made repeatedly about the Lucy Bedroque tour is that it was not a booking arrangement between two rosters.
Where things stand now
The spring 2026 North American run behind the album started in Seattle on 18 April and finished in Toronto on 14 May, and a large part of it sold out, including two nights at Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. V Magazine covered the tour on 19 May 2026, with Foley noting that travelling by road rather than air made the whole thing calmer: 'It feels good not having to fly everywhere.' Atlanta, at The Masquerade on 1 May, is the show both artists single out as the best of the run — and the strangest, with a crowd that took to biting each other and police turning up mid-set.
Since then the pace has held. A hometown-adjacent date at The Atlantis in Washington, DC on 26 July 2026 was the most recent listed North American show before the current leg. Songkick counts 20 upcoming concerts across six countries and 5,684 people tracking the act for alerts.
The European run opens at EartH in London on 25 September 2026, then Opium in Dublin on 27 September, New Century Hall in Manchester on 30 September and a second EartH date on 2 October, before Le Botanique in Brussels on 5 October, Le Trabendo in Paris on 7 October, Luxor in Cologne on 8 October and Hole 44 in Berlin on 9 October. Those German dates are billed as Lucy Bedroque with kuru. A winter North American leg follows: Union Transfer in Philadelphia on 17 and 18 November, Big Night Live in Boston on 19 and 20 November, ReelWorks in Denver on 1 December, The Depot in Salt Lake City on 2 December, Showbox SoDo in Seattle on 4 December, Wonder Ballroom in Portland on 6 December, the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on 8 December and three nights at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles on 9, 10 and 11 December.
What the room does
The shows are short, loud and stacked. On the spring run the bill ran kuru first, the producer 9lives in the middle behind a DJ setup, and Lucy Bedroque last, with the whole evening coming in at around an hour and a half to two hours rather than a single long headline set.
A student reviewer at the sold-out Holocene show in Portland on 19 April 2026 described the building rumbling and the floor vibrating during 9lives' set, a mosh pit that swallowed most of the room, and air that went hot and foggy by the end. Kuru's own portion drew on Backstage Hologram, including 'Noir Kei' and 'U wld never do it'. Staging is minimal — effects gear and a small table — and the volume and the crowd do the rest.
The venues have grown accordingly. A run that played 500-capacity rooms in April is booking two-night stands at Union Transfer and Big Night Live in November and three at the Fonda in December, which is the clearest measure of what the album did.
The show, now
A kuru show in 2026 is part of a shared bill rather than a solo headline: on the spring North American run kuru opened, the producer 9lives played a DJ set in the middle and Lucy Bedroque closed, with the full evening lasting roughly an hour and a half to two hours. The set draws mainly on Backstage Hologram — 'Noir Kei' and 'U wld never do it' both featured at the sold-out Holocene show in Portland on 19 April 2026 — and the staging is spare, effects gear and a small table, with sub-bass and the crowd doing the work. A student reviewer at that show described the floor vibrating, a mosh pit taking over the room and the air turning hot and foggy by the end. The Atlanta date at The Masquerade on 1 May 2026 is the one Foley singles out, for a crowd that started biting each other and for police appearing mid-set. The European leg opens at EartH in London on 25 September 2026, with the German dates billed as Lucy Bedroque with kuru; the winter leg steps up to two nights at Union Transfer in Philadelphia and three at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · thefader.com · vmagazine.com · songkick.com · songkick.com · ochselevator.com · music.apple.com