Arjun Kanungo HAS A GRAND PLAN

The pop star is navigating entrepreneurship in music and tech with his company One Mind and realizes he thrives best in the pop space

- ANURAG TAGAT

Arjun Kanungo is working all the time. He’s seated on a hotel bed in Tokyo in a black tank top and talking about how he wants to just hang out and party in Japan, but he just ends up working. It’s well into the evening in the Land of the Rising Sun, and Kanungo is not winding down just yet.

“I’m actually at a shoot. We’re in a hotel room, so I’m not home yet,” he chuckles. If there’s a tinge of tiredness, Kanungo, 34, does well to hide it. Or, he’s just genuinely excited to be making inroads into Japan’s music and technology industry in recent times—where his album Industry2 (released in August 2023) had the song “India To Japan” with Japanese rapper Cyber Rui, a more authentic output came almost a year later, with “Tell Me” releasing in February this year.

On the plaintive J-pop song, you hear Kanungo’s collaborator, Japanese artist Ren’s voice first, taking on a pop croon in Japanese and English. Kanungo steps in just a bit later and “Tell Me” flows like a late-night piano ballad, written by acclaimed and globetrotting songwriter Kanata Okajima. She’s written for everyone from BTS to TWICE to Baby Metal, so there’s an earnestness that just pours out of “Tell Me” thanks to Okajima.

The song was written nearly a year ago, but he learned that the hands of the Japanese music industry are meticulous planners. “When we wrote ‘Tell Me’ and finished it in early 2023, Ren had his whole year planned out. His management was clear that this was a song for February 2024,” Kanungo says, with respect in his voice.