Southern hip-hop has given us subgenres including chopped and screwed, trap, crunk and more. But when rising rapper Hanumankind delivers the line “I come from the southside, southside baby”, it’s something of a double entendre. Yes, he’s got a deliciously accentuated Project Pat-style drawl (the Tennessee artist is one of many to co-sign Hanumankind). But his tracks are just as likely to showcase a different kind of south: take the Parimal Shais-produced beats on Go to Sleep and Ayyayyo, with their coiling nadaswaram, a south Indian wind instrument.
Hanumankind (whose real name is Sooraj Cherukat) spent his formative years in Houston but was born in Kerala and has lived in Bangalore since 2012. He first started freestyling in high school; nearly a decade later, in 2019, he began to release his own music. Soon he was signed to Def Jam India, the fledgling branch of the famous multinational label.
