Actor, guitarist and songwriter Moses Koul releases his debut single, Jee Le!

Moses Koul has the kind of face that tends to linger. There is something almost old-school movie-star about him — the arresting features, the languid ease, the fashion that looks instinctive rather than styled and, most dangerously, that voice: deep, warm and unhurried, with the sort of grain that makes even an ordinary sentence sound faintly seductive. It is perhaps no surprise that when he arrived on screen in Netflix’s Class (2023), he was difficult to ignore. The series, adapted from the Spanish hit Elite, introduced him as Sharan Gujral, a character with considerably more beneath the surface than his polished exterior suggested. But music, it turns out, was there long before the cameras. Long before the acting, the Instagram guitar covers and the recognition. Moses has been a musician for most of his life, working with bands, producing for other artistes and playing the guitar for some of the biggest names in the country. Now, with Jee Le, his debut single that has just released, he steps into the light in an entirely different way — not as an actor playing a character, not as the guitarist standing slightly to the side of the stage, but as Moses Koul, solo artist; and he is clearly still getting used to the idea.

Jee Le is the first of four songs and for Moses it felt like the right door through which to enter. There is a sweetness to it, a certain buoyancy, but beneath its easy charm is something more wistful — the nervous exhilaration of stepping out into an unknown world. “I wanted to write a song that I would love to listen to when I was going on a drive,” he begins. “The song essentially tries to capture this feeling one has as a young adolescent — you are excited about what’s outside the main door of your house,” Moses explains, as we catch up with him ahead of his performance in the city. It is a beautiful metaphor for where he finds himself now. Outside the door is everything: love, uncertainty, failure, possibility, an audience, perhaps even the version of himself he has not yet met. “What happens when I step out of my house? Who will I meet? Who will I bump into? What kind of stories exist out there? What kind of people exist out there? Is there love outside? Is there acceptance outside?” he asks. There is something wonderfully boyish about the questions, especially coming from someone who has already spent years navigating the worlds of music and the celluloid.

Music, for Moses, has always been about that physical act of feeling. “It’s the only thing that I have that’s not purely digital in its experience,” he tells us. Perhaps that is why he has resisted making Jee Le overly clever. He wanted the lyrics to sound like conversation rather than poetry being performed for an audience. “I wanted to keep the lyrics very conversational. I did not want to make it complex or try to sound or fabricate an intelligence just for the sake of it,” the singer explains. There is something telling about that instinct. Moses may look like someone who could effortlessly inhabit a glossy campaign — the sort of man fashion photographers would probably enjoy dressing in black, putting him under a pool of light and allowing his cheekbones to do the rest — but his artistic philosophy is almost aggressively human. He is suspicious of perfection.

“In today’s day and age, a lot of emphasis has been put on being perfect, feeling perfect — mentally perfect, physically perfect, visually perfect. I find that almost evil,” Moses shares. The words land with surprising force. “We are all, I wouldn’t say flawed, but we have our own idiosyncrasies that kind of make us who we are. And I feel that when you try to polish it and you try to buff it all out to create this almost AI-perfect caricature of who you are… it’s evil,” the actor observes. For Moses, music is where those rough edges are allowed to remain. Some days he is happy, some days pensive, some days sad. “I don’t want to buff those things out because those are the things that will probably add character to anything that I do,” he says. “If I needed to create something that’s just cookie-cutter perfect, then I don’t think I’ll be interested in it at all.” Moses adds.

Is that what makes talking to him so easy? There is no great attempt to arrive at the perfect answer, no sense that every sentence needs to become a soundbite. He talks, pauses, laughs, thinks about it and then talks some more. It feels less like an interview and more like a conversation with a friend who happens to have a very good voice and an unusually interesting life. That je ne sais quoi philosophy extends to the music itself. Jee Le may be the opening statement, but it is not a blueprint for everything that follows. Moses describes the four songs using an unexpectedly luxurious analogy. “Let’s take the example of an Armani suit,” the singer says, adding, “Armani has a DNA that no matter the design, no matter the structure, no matter the person wearing it — you can tell when a certain suit is an Armani because there’s a DNA to it.” The four songs, he explains, share that invisible thread. “There is a spine, there is a coherent DNA that’s running throughout the four songs. But sonically, within this EP itself, we will have four very distinct sounds,” he explains.It is a very Moses way of putting it, really. There is style, but there is also substance. The clothes may be beautiful, the face may photograph well, the voice may stop you mid-sentence, but there has to be something underneath it all. The second song, Ek Raat, is already underway and sonically it inhabits a very different world. Yet Moses believes listeners will recognise the same sensibility beneath it. “When I’m making it, however, I have no clue what I’m doing. It’s like a child playing with Lego. You don’t know what you’re building. You’re just kind of connecting the dots and that’s what’s fun for me,” he says. He trusts taste more than formulas. “Every artiste has a taste and they kind of use that taste to guide them in their choices,” he states.

It is also why his music feels like a rediscovery of himself. He spent years avoiding the microphone, choosing the guitar partly because it allowed him to remain just outside the spotlight. “I always knew how to compose. It was just about executing it. I think, I always was killing the vocalist in me because I think I never wanted to be centre stage,” Moses admits. The guitar offered an escape. “I took up guitar because I was like: oh, I’m just on the side. All the attention is on the vocalist,” he shares. Eventually, however, the voice demanded to be heard. “I took out a year to completely isolate myself and figure out what my voice is,” he says. “And of course, I’m still figuring it out. It’s a long journey ahead,” he tells us. It is hard not to smile at the idea of someone with a voice as naturally sensual as Moses’ spending a year figuring out whether he should be using it. There is something rather lovely about watching someone who has already been in the room decide, finally, to walk towards the centre of it. At seven, his mother put him into tabla classes. “I would come back from kindergarten… dressed up in this kurta pyjama, white, because that was the outfit for the classes,” he recalls. “I would sit there and I would want to do everything else except be there,” he laughs.

Yet those lessons became foundational. “That instrument changed my life,” he admits. “When your rhythmic foundation is sorted, learning music becomes a lot faster,” he reveals. The guitar came later, lessons courtesy of Google and YouTube. Eventually came bands, live performances and touring, followed by an audition to join Arijit Singh’s team. In 2020, just as a world tour was about to begin, the COVID-19 pandemic intervened. Then came the audition for Class. Life, he says, has consistently thrown curveballs at him. Perchance that is why he seems so comfortable with not knowing exactly what comes next. His story has never followed a particularly straight line. But maybe the biggest curveball was discovering that the boy who preferred standing beside the vocalist and the microphone would one day have to stand in front of it. His time working with artistes such as Arijit Singh also taught him something important: careers are built on catalogues, not merely moments. “I was like, okay, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to focus not on getting a viral hit, but more so a catalogue where I give my life to songs that are going to make it out into the real world,” he shares.

That is an unusually patient ambition in an industry increasingly obsessed with the 30-second hook. And Moses is refreshingly sceptical of the machinery surrounding music — including the pressure to turn artistes into perfectly packaged objects. He is, after all, a highly visual artiste himself. His wardrobe, his face, his physicality, his voice — all of it could very easily become part of the product. Yet he sees image and music not as competing forces but as different languages of the same performance. “I think in images, I think in worlds, I think in movies, I think in cinema,” he says. “So, for me, the visual aspect of music is not separate from music itself because I consider it part of the performance,” he adds. His inspirations are revealing: Prince, George Michael, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson — artistes for whom sound and silhouette were inseparable. “I am a very visual person,” the artiste says simply. A simplicity that also extends to his desires from his career in film.

Superstardom does not particularly seduce him. “Actors around me, I wonder if their desire to be a superstar is truly their desire? Or is it something that they have co-opted because everybody around them is saying that superstardom is the way to go?” he comments. “I don’t think any extreme is good,” he says. “I’m not an extreme person. I’m also a very flexible person.” he admits. That flexibility will apply to acting too. He has another project due for release in November, a comedy that he deliberately chose because it is so different from Class. “I just want to give the audience really good material from me as an artiste. That’s it. That’s my aim,” the actor concludes.

Jee Le is now streaming on all audio and video platforms.