Nine Songs: Nish Kumar

For Nish Kumar, that impulse gradually became more deliberate. Music shifted from something he simply consumes into something he organises around himself: a practice of listing, sorting, and structuring listening. It’s an instinct that stretches back to CD-Rs, mixtapes, and radio recordings, where listening was never entirely passive. It had to be placed within a wider system of meaning.

The playlists he now builds even sit inside the architecture of his shows, playing both backstage and as audiences enter the auditorium. They’re not decorative; they set a tone in real time, shaping the space while also acting as a personal archive of whatever period he’s working in. “I’ve made playlists that are just the year,” he explains. “A mixture of stuff that came out in that year, and also stuff loosely connected to my life in that year.”

For 2026, a new Mitski track sits next to a Chet Atkins and Dolly Parton duet; a fresh release alongside something older that re-entered his life through context rather than chronology. The result is still less about curation in a traditional sense than about building a running map of mood and time, one that moves fluidly between listening, performance and escape.

That same instinct extends into performance in a more direct way through DJing with fellow comedian James Acaster, something he is quick to qualify as “DJing” in what he calls “the biggest inverted commas in human history.” For Kumar, it sits somewhere between escape and environment-building. “It’s kind of a bit of everything, to be honest,” he says. “I use music for everything; it’s an escape for me.”

It’s a kind of escape that is less about shutting the world out and more about shaping a different kind of space. He describes thinking constantly about music in terms of movement and atmosphere, including when working with Acaster in front of an audience. “I’m often thinking about the physical escape as it pertains to DJ sets.”

These architectural ways of engaging with music makes our Nine Songs feature an uneasy exercise for the comedian. The idea of narrowing everything down cuts against the systems Kumar has built around listening, and he is quick to describe it as destabilising.

“This thing did my fucking head in and gave me a huge amount of stress,” he admits. “I basically had to bring in my own parameters. I’ve picked songs that connect to albums that define different phases of my life. Well, eight of them. We’ll come to the ninth. This is what happens when the list maker is asked to make lists.”

Still, taken together, his selections suggest a pattern: urgency, political pressure, emotional volatility, and a parallel pull towards introspection and form. For someone known for being one of comedy’s leading political comedians, this is perhaps not surprising.

Talking about his upcoming tour, Angry Humour From a Really Nice Guy, Kumar speaks about feeling, for now, excited about the prospect of doing it, given that it’s far enough away to still be a “semi-abstract concept”. With stand-up defined by a willingness to stay inside political discomfort rather than resolve it, working through systems of power and contradiction in real time.

Even at its most personal, his material rarely detaches from wider pressures, moving between individual experience and broader political weight without separating the two. A similar instinct runs through his broader relationship with music, not just in the playlists he builds for shows or the way he uses music in performance, but in how he listens and organises it more generally, treating music less as background or escape and more as something to structure time, mood, and memory around, in the same way his comedy structures and processes experience.

From these Nine Songs then, emerges less a set of influences than a shared instinct across forms: a tendency to organise intensity rather than diffuse it. Music, like comedy, becomes a way of holding pressure in place long enough to make sense of it, even if only temporarily.