For more than a decade, Chinese superstar KUN existed inside what he describes as a box – the idol system that made him famous, but also flattened him into something easier for the world to understand. No matter how his music evolved, no matter how much he changed, the label stayed the same: idol, a symbol of perfection and projection. People thought they knew him. He wasn’t so sure.
“They see you as an idol no matter what you do,” he tells NME over video call from Dubai, where he’s preparing to perform at the Krazy Super Concert.
It wasn’t just the outside world’s perception of him that he’s struggled with, though. When he looked at himself, he also didn’t know who he saw. “In the past few years, I was fighting with myself,” he says. “When I stand in the mirror, I see myself and try to think, ‘Who is this person, really?’”
His self-titled English-language album, released earlier this month, is the result of extensive searching for answers. Across 11 songs shaped by vintage soul, rock, jazz, and R&B, he sings about drowning, disappearing, yearning for love, and becoming someone new. It’s an album haunted by death and rebirth but animated by something else, too: the possibility of finally being understood.
“I made this album to tell people, to tell the world who I really am,” he says. “Actually, I’m not changing. I’m going back to myself.”
KUN, born Cai Xukun, first rose to fame in 2018 as the breakout winner of the Chinese survival show Idol Producer, where his self-written song ‘I Wanna Get Love’ became a Number One hit. In the years that followed, he became one of the country’s defining pop figures – breaking streaming records, mentoring younger artists, and building a global profile that extended into fashion, where he served as an ambassador for brands like Prada and Versace.
But even at the height of that success, he was still searching for a way to exist outside the identity that introduced him to the world.
Choosing himself, it turns out, was freeing. “Because when you’re being yourself, it’s actually easier,” he says. Still, the first step required a kind of courage. He had to stop overthinking, trust his instincts and step outside the box.
That moment arrived with the smooth retro-pop of ‘Deadman’, the first single of this titular new era. The character at its centre isn’t fictional, exactly. It’s someone he knows well. “[It] 100 per cent represents who I am,” he says, without hesitation. The figure he created – someone caught in an endless cycle of ending and beginning – came from a deeply familiar part of himself he had been circling for years without fully naming. The feeling, he says, is “always inside of my soul and my heart”. It lived there long before it became a song, first as instinct and then as a realisation he couldn’t ignore: that he had been shedding versions of himself over and over again, sometimes without even noticing it happening.
“A lot of people want to be safe. But to me, it’s boring. Why should people listen to me if I’m just singing like everybody else?”
He laughs when asked how many versions he’s had to leave behind: “So many.” The answer comes easily, even if the weight of it doesn’t. He speaks about those past selves without bitterness or regret, as if they were necessary stages in a process he never fully controlled but always understood he had to follow. Staying still was never an option. “My personality is like, I’m never satisfied,” he says. “I like to push myself to the next level all the time.”
That restlessness shaped how he works. KUN holds writing and production credits on every song on the album, treating the studio like a place to document his own evolution in real time. Some songs arrived in solitude. ‘Jasmine’, he says, began as nothing more than a groove looping in his head, something he chased down alone and shaped into a song over the course of two days.
Other moments emerged out of communal songwriting camps, where emotion guided the process more than structure. “We’re drinking whiskey, we’re dancing together, talking about my feelings, my story,” he recalls of one late-night session. As guitars and drums came to life around him, he began improvising melodies into the microphone, letting the character of ‘Deadman’ reveal itself piece by piece. By the next day, he had stripped the hook down to its emotional core – “I’m a dead man” – and recorded it almost immediately.
In the same camp, he also wrote ‘What a Day’, its retro warmth and big-band optimism sitting at the opposite end of the album’s emotional spectrum. Instead of polishing it endlessly, he chose to record it live, in a single take. The imperfections stayed. The breathing stayed. The moment stayed. “It’s not about chasing the perfect take,” he says. Instead, it’s about sounding human.
However these tracks started, the goal was always the same: to follow the feeling wherever it led. “Everything is very natural,” he says. “It’s not like you have to be very serious making a song.”
Taking control of the album also meant embracing risk, even when it made people question him. He pushed his voice into unfamiliar places, kept improvised takes that others told him to smooth out, and resisted the instinct to make the music more conventional. Safety, he believes, brings its own kind of danger. “A lot of people want to be safe. Pop-safe. Just standard,” he says. “But to me, it’s boring. Why should people listen to me if I’m just singing like everybody else?”
His voice can feel almost anachronistic. One moment, it’s velvety and controlled, rich with the kind of weight that made Elvis Presley sound larger than the room around him. The next, it lifts into a piercing falsetto, sharp and searching, revealing something more fragile beneath the surface. He grew up on David Bowie and Elvis, artists who understood that a voice could do more than carry a melody – it could carry a persona.
As KUN talks about the album, he returns often to the idea of characters. He sees his life the same way. It’s like a film he’s still inside, one that continues whether he’s ready or not, unfolding chapter by chapter in ways he can only fully understand in retrospect. There are versions of himself he’s proud of, and versions he’s already outgrown, but none of them feel separate from the person he is now. They exist in sequence, each one arriving when it’s needed, each one carrying him forward into the next.
“In the past few years, I was fighting with myself. When I stand in the mirror, I see myself and try to think, ‘Who is this person, really?’”
The only constant, he says, is motion. “I’m always on that journey. Always going forward. I never stop.” The past isn’t somewhere he lives anymore, but it isn’t something he discards, either. As confined as he sometimes felt inside the idol system, it gave him the foundation he still stands on – teaching him how to work hard, how to sing, how to dance, how to carry the attention of thousands without breaking under its weight. It remains part of him, embedded in the person he’s still becoming. “That’s what makes me who I am today.”
But constant motion has its own emotional cost. Across ‘KUN’, loneliness lingers beneath the surface, shaping the album’s emotional gravity even in its warmest moments. On the guitar-driven ‘Colder’, he sings about numbness and emotional paralysis, his voice drifting through sparse instrumentation as he repeats the title like a quiet surrender. In ‘Washed Away’, he sounds submerged, overwhelmed by feelings that refuse to let go. Again and again, he returns to the same emotional terrain: isolation, disappearance, and the fragile hope of connection. Beneath the heavy imagery and rebirth metaphors, the album is driven by yearning – not just for love, but for recognition, for understanding, for a version of himself that feels fully seen.
Onstage, that recognition comes easily. He’s spent years performing, learning how to hold the attention of thousands of people at once, how to turn emotion into spectacle. In those moments, the distance between himself and the audience collapses. “Every time I see the crowd, I feel them,” he says. But the closeness is temporary. When the lights fade, and the noise dissolves, something else takes its place. “It feels so empty when you get off,” he adds. The transition is disorienting, moving from the highest emotional altitude back into solitude.
He sees each song as part of a larger narrative, a single character moving through different emotional states. The final track, ‘Fool’, was designed to feel like both an ending and a beginning. He wanted it to play like the closing scene of a film, the camera lingering just long enough to suggest what might come next. In tarot, The Fool represents the start of a journey – a leap of faith into the unknown. When he hears that interpretation, he smiles. “I like that,” he says.
It’s an image that mirrors where he finds himself now: no longer trapped inside the version of himself the world first met, but not fully defined by what comes next, either. For the first time, KUN isn’t trying to be what people expect. He’s trying to be someone no one has heard before.
KUN’s ‘KUN’ is out now via 88rising.