The new single by Pauli The PSM, “Handsome,” is the flip side of a coin for “I Don’t Deserve You (Sunshine).” While August’s meditative song vulnerably questioned his relationship with his audience, the new one is a swaggering self-empowerment anthem he hopes listeners take to heart.

It’s right there in the chorus: “I’m so handsome/ Pay the ransom.”

“I love you saying it because it’s an affirmation,” says the 35-year-old U.K. artist, born Pauli Stanley-McKenzie, in a video call from L.A. where he’s working on music, when presented with the song’s hook.

“I want everyone to be able to say that to themselves in the mirror. I feel like we do so great of a job of speaking down on ourselves,” he says. “It’s so easy to say, ‘I’m not very good,’ or ‘I’m quite shy,’ or ‘I’m nervous,’ but it should be just as easy to say ‘I’m beautiful. I’m loved, I deserve love, I deserve joy. I’m beautiful; I’m handsome.’ You’re allowed to say these things.”

“I’m enjoying stepping into that power in that song,” Pauli The PSM adds. “Even when you say it to me, there’s a smile on your face. There’s a smile on my face. What a joy to be able to express those very simple words, ‘I’m so handsome.’”

The musician, who found success first as a drummer before striking it big more recently as the music director for Harry Styles on his recent world tour and then as DJ for U2’s Las Vegas residency at Sphere, describes “I Don’t Deserve You” as the question and “Handsome” as the answer.

“It shows the duality of my life. I don’t think one works without the other,” he says. “I feel like being human, you have that feeling, ‘Am I supposed to be there?’ some days, and then other days, you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m supposed to be there. I’m the shit. This is exactly where I’m supposed to be.’ That’s the magic of life. That’s the magic of being human. I really want the listener to go on that journey with me and to embrace their humanity and feel vulnerable, let go and feel something.”

Pauli’s journey began when he started playing drums at 11. He grew up in London to Jamaican parents of Senegalese heritage. In school, he had to pick an instrument and tried the clarinet first. But it didn’t stick. It wasn’t cool enough, and at his school they called it the “misery stick” and “gloom tube,” he said. To his parents’ disappointment (and hurt eardrums), he switched to the cooler instrument.

In 2005, he won a youth drumming competition, and while in college, he got to go on tour in South Africa. To make it work, he had to feign illness for a week to skip his classes. He fell in love with the music lifestyle and decided then that that’s what he wanted to do. He began auditioning for drumming gigs with bands, which led to stints with Gorillaz when he was 20, and eventually music directing on tours with FKA Twigs, Jamie xx, Kelsey Lu, Robyn and Sampha.

In the early 2010s, Pauli spent a few years living in New York City, when he dabbled in other arts, started a Brit-centric music club and also modeled for British fashion brand, Ben Sherman.

While his stage name, PSM, is an acronym of his given name, it’s also based on a book he read when he was in school, Joseph Murphy’s “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind,” which he describes as being about our “most powerful internal vibration.”

He got another nickname, “Lovejoy,” from the late rock, soul and jazz great Bobby Womack, with whom he played some of the icon’s final shows. Womack could never remember Pauli’s name, so he’d refer to him as “kid,” “son” or “youngin’.” Ahead of a headlining performance at Glastonbury Festival in 2013, Pauli visited Womack in his dressing room to thank him for the opportunity.

“He turned around to me, like a real kind of ‘Godfather’ moment, and he said, ‘Youngin’ … one thing about you. You’ve got this love. You’ve got this joy. Lovejoy. Yeah. Lovejoy,’” Pauli recalls. “That was it. That was the last conversation I ever had with him before he passed away, so it almost felt like it was a gift from Bobby giving me that moment.”

His biggest break came when Harry Styles chose the drummer for his Love on Tour, which ran from 2021 to 2023. One of the shows was at Slane Castle in Ireland. U2’s Bono came out to support his son, the singer of opening band Inhaler, and was impressed by the drummer’s performance style. When U2 was looking for a DJ to open all of the band’s Sphere shows, he had U2’s team reach out to Pauli The PSM for the gig.

“I think that the key thing here to remember is … it was always about music and art … and enriching every situation I was given in order to add value,” Pauli says. “If I was playing drums in the band, it wasn’t just about beating away at the back of the stage. It was about bringing the stage to the people and making the show as exciting and dynamic as possible. I want people to leave the show thinking, ‘Damn, that show is good. And damn, how about that drummer?!’ That was my MO. They say the band is only as good as its drummer. The great thing is that the bands that I worked with gave me that platform to really be myself and to come out of myself. I just never looked back. I’m always looking forward, and it’s been an incredible journey. In some ways, I feel like it’s just beginning.”

Pauli The PSM released a debut EP, The Idea of Tomorrow, in 2016. The record included a spoken-word introduction by actor Idris Elba (who’d go on to start his own DJ side project). The two met while Elba was filming “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.” He says both also contributed to one of Damon Albarn’s (Gorillaz, Blur) Africa Express albums, in Mali.

The two hit it off and then reconnected in London.

“I wrote this monologue. I thought he’d be the perfect person to read this piece,” Pauli says. “He’s got the voice of God. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to ask him to read it.”

Several more EPs and singles preceded his 2022 debut album, OFFAIR: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind: SPACE, a sort of ambient album inspired by Afrofuturism and his interest in the cosmos.

At the same time, he continued making music to make people move and groove, such as “Milkyway” and “Saucy.”

The self-deprecating “I Don’t Deserve You (Sunshine)” was his first release in nearly a year. Pauli The PSM says that he was purposefully “not being fair to myself” in the song.

“It’s also me being very human and very vulnerable,” he says. “Even in my highest state of joy, when I’m creating, I’m saying, ‘I don’t know if I really deserve to be myself. I don’t know if I deserve to be the fullness of the joy that I am; if I deserve for you to experience me in this moment of being everything that I hope to be.’ So the ‘you’ … is literal in terms of you as a listener, but it’s also about me and my projection of self.”

It’s not about feelings of imposter syndrome, he adds. It’s about asking life’s bigger questions, even those without firm answers. It’s also just one half of the story that Pauli completes with the braggadocious “Handsome.”

“When you look in the mirror and you see yourself, I want you to see me. Because when I look out in the audience, and I see there’s hundreds of thousands of people that I’ve seen over the last three years, I just see myself every single one of them.”

Pauli The PSM says what he wants newer listeners to take away from his art: “There’s a Maya Angelou quote that says, ‘We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike,’ I think that is how I see the world. We also have a saying in Jamaica, where my parents are from: ‘Out of many, one people.’ That’s how I see us as humans in this world. We’re all the same.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.