Buddha Boy (Andrii Horbatyi)

Buddha Boy, also known as Bodhi, is a Canada-based underground artist whose debut album Children of the Sun reflects a transcontinental life shaped by travel, street performance, and spiritual searching. Born Andrew, he has described the Buddha Boy name as both a nod to Buddhist influence and a reminder to remain grounded — “Boy” keeping him connected to the street-level simplicity and underground community from which he emerged. In his own telling, the project grew out of years spent moving between Europe, Asia, Africa, Ukraine, and North America, absorbing the social realities, cultural contrasts, and human connections that now form the core of his music.

Promotional materials surrounding the album describe Bodhi’s path as stretching “from the Ukrainian ghetto to the international underground scene,” while emphasizing his early years performing on the streets of Europe. That sense of movement is central to Children of the Sun, a record conceived not as a conventional hip-hop release but as a broad, personal statement built from travel, collaboration, and lived experience. Rather than aligning himself with any single genre, Bodhi explicitly rejects strict stylistic labels, describing his music as an experimental blend of hip-hop, reggae, electronic music, dancehall, beatbox, throat singing, and world or ethnic influences.

At the heart of Children of the Sun is a philosophy of connection. In interviews, Bodhi frames the album as a response to fractured times — wars, inequality, political disillusionment, and spiritual disconnection — while insisting that the deeper purpose is not protest alone, but unity. He presents the album as a meeting place for artists from different countries, backgrounds, and languages, united by what he calls a shared underground spirit. The title itself reflects that idea: no matter how old or accomplished we become, he argues, we remain “children of something bigger than ourselves.”

The material on Children of the Sun draws heavily from Bodhi’s own life. He has described the album as a “crystallized” expression of years spent witnessing poverty and privilege, struggle and resilience, love and grief. Those themes surface throughout the record’s song sequence, from the self-defining opener “Not an MC” and the socially conscious “Reality” to the balance-seeking “Yin Yang World,” the collaborative “Heartbeat,” and the more introspective “Feelings,” which Bodhi has said was inspired by one of his past relationships and written as a meditation on soul connection, loss, and emotional awakening.

The album also reflects Bodhi’s commitment to international collaboration. Interview material confirms appearances by MC Mystie on “Heartbeat,” Don Husky on “Darkest Night,” and Indian vocalist Mahesh Vinayakram on “Hands in the Air,” the latter combining Bodhi’s anti-war message with Vinayakram’s vocal performance of the Sanskrit mantra Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu (“May all beings everywhere be happy and free”). Bodhi has emphasized that these collaborations were not assembled through industry planning, but through organic encounters with artists he met while travelling — people he felt aligned with spiritually and creatively.

That same worldview shapes his broader artistic identity. Bodhi repeatedly distinguishes his work from commercial music-making, arguing that mainstream music is often built as product, while Children of the Sun was built as art: spontaneous, personal, and resistant to trend-chasing. He sees the record less as a solo statement than as a communal work, stressing that the album belongs as much to the collaborators, engineers, designers, filmmakers, and friends who helped bring it together as it does to him. In that sense, Children of the Sun functions not only as a debut album, but as a document of a borderless underground network — a record rooted in conscious lyricism, spiritual inquiry, and the belief that music can still serve as a form of human connection.

-Robert Williston