Sejal Kumar Has Finally Found Her Groove

Content creator and singer Sejal Kumar never really saw her foray into music as a pivot. Despite growing her 1.47 million-strong YouTube community through DIY fashion hacks, behind-the-scenes glimpses into young adulthood, and candid conversations on body image, mental health, and ambition, music had always been bubbling under the surface—waiting to burst out.

So when opportunity came knocking in the form of a YouTube Creators for Change campaign with the Obama Foundation in 2020, she didn’t just answer—she kicked the door wide open. As part of the campaign, she wrote and sang her first original song, “Aisi Hun,” which amassed a million views in just a week. In fact, writing the song, which spoke about how the courage to face your fear often begins with feeling heard at home, helped her push past her own apprehensions.

Inspired by Troye Sivan and Conan Gray, who were both YouTubers before they became pop icons, Sejal curates dreamy melodies and lyrics that read more like pages from her journal. Her early releases like “Influence” and “Destiny” felt more like nods to her musical influences, with a polished pop production style featuring catchy hooks, upbeat tempos, and verses that captured the anxieties of an extremely online existence. But in her latest EP, Finding Joy, her evolution is loud and clear. She blends mellow synths, acoustic licks, and playful rhythms that give her introspective lyrics room to breathe. The result is a sound that’s warmer, more self-assured, and entirely her own. And, as she quickly points out, it almost didn’t happen. 

Finding her joy again: “I wanted to quit music entirely before I released that EP,” she says, with the same sincerity that’s made her so relatable online. Sejal admits that after releasing her album Shy in 2022, she went through a difficult mental health phase and began worrying she’d lose her audience if she continued pursuing music. “But if you really have heartstrings [attached] to something, it pulls you back, you know? And that happened for me with Finding Joy.” The journey of learning and unlearning to pick herself up and put the pieces back together is mapped across the arc of her EP. It begins with “Yakeen,” the first song she wrote—a soft ballad capturing a moment of lost self-belief—and builds toward “Ishaare,” a buoyant track about reclaiming fearlessness. “The EP [captures] the full graph: from sad to happy to confident,” she explains. “In my first album, I was in that space where I was upset with a lot of things. Like with ‘Influence’, maybe I was irritated with measuring your worth in numbers, because obviously that tends to happen when you fall prey to short-term thinking and metrics, and you feel like a product yourself. But now, I’m in a space where I feel good and don’t pay too much importance to things like that.”

A bold new direction: With “Ishaare,” Sejal doesn’t just sing about overcoming self-doubt—she owns it, choosing to direct the music video herself. “Making content for so long also gave me the skills to be able to put a project like that together and direct it,” she points out, excitedly pulling out her phone to reveal the visual board she made for the video. The result is a cinematic set bathed in a warm glow to mirror her emotional state, as she moves with a fluidity that feels less like choreography and more like emotional release. “For my first album, Shy, I worked with this director called Crevixa and learned so much just by watching him and asking questions. Making a music video is expensive, so I thought why not just try doing it with my little team? I’m really proud [of how it turned out], because it gave me the confidence that doing something in this zone is possible.”

Taking up space: Fueled by her newfound momentum and maturity, Sejal has slowly made her way from the screen to the stage. After manifesting her way to Nagaland’s Hornbill festival lineup last year, she recently performed at Social Nation, one of India’s biggest creator festivals. She’s also started a low-key unplugged gig series called Inner Circle, where she plays acoustic versions of her originals, busts out covers, and sometimes even does karaoke with the crowd. What makes the community she’s built through her music even more special, she adds, is that it’s a reminder of how far she’s come. “During my first performance at the YouTube fan fest, I wasn’t used to a large crowd and how the echoes are, so I picked up the wrong key for the first line. God, it was embarrassing. But it [taught me how to] recover from such experiences. I’ve forgotten lyrics a few times, especially at the Inner Circle events, and had to ask somebody to Google them. But [it’s shown me] there’s no need to be perfect. These things just make it more fun.”