CHXID! started rapping in tenth grade when he lost a girl to another guy who could sing. “He wasn’t even writing his own songs, just singing covers of other artists’ work,” he says with the humor of reflection tinged with the frustration he felt those long five years ago. Although he never got her back, it put him onto the path to becoming an artist in his own right, helping him to create an identity that has struck a chord with younger fans around the country.

For the past year, the majority of CHXID’s music has revolved around a fictional character named Sood Lhor (slang for pretty boy in Thai) and he dedicates a significant portion of his lyrics to this metaphorical enemy who lives such an easy life. “Everyone’s got a Sood Lhor in their life, someone they really hate on for having it all,” he says on an oppressively humid summer day on his way home from law school. Otherwise, his lyrics are generally about girls and life, a sound he characterizes as parody sexxnb—and it’s a style that appeals mainly to girls, based on his streaming analytics and the audiences he performs to.

He occasionally slides into the club pop wave by way of a few Jersey club tracks, where he collaborates with Yungtarr and Ape Fredda. CHXID says he was exposed to Jersey a couple of years ago by a Twitch streamer who would mumble incoherently over the iconic club triplets rooted way back in 1990s Baltimore that have now stretched all across the world. The streamer led him to the new icons of the sound like Newark’s Bandmanrill and Philly’s 2Rare, providing him with the perfect template to cuss out his fictional enemies.

The majority of CHXID’s lyrics are bilingual, but he didn’t plan it that way. At first, he wanted to rap only in English, like the Western artists that originally inspired him, but over time he realized that his fans are Thai, so it just makes sense to rap in Thai as well. He learned how to speak English with friends, trading jokes as kids with a sense of humor deemed inappropriate in Thai. It wasn’t spoken at school or at home, so it gave them a sense of privacy of sorts. But he lets inspiration dictate which language to use when writing lyrics—sometimes English just works better in the moment, other times it’s Thai.

CHXID is part of the Dha Vision label, a Thai collective of about ten artists and four producers. They had all been friends online, supporting and reposting each other’s work for about a year until 2022 when many of them were invited to perform at SoundCloud Rising. “It was the first time we had met each other in real life,” he laughs. After that, the team came together formally and now they frequently collaborate, record, and perform together.

While CHXID is solidly an underground artist and it’s helped him build a fanbase and cultivate a style, he hopes to one day move onto the mainstream. “It’s so hard to get gigs in the underground,” he grumbles. “I think we all want to become mainstream artists and make money from it, but it’s no fun right now. In the underground, you can experiment a lot more. I’m always looking for something new and I want something new for the music industry. I’m doing my best to keep my audience up to date so that we can all grow together.”