New boyband Boy Throb spent year fighting for final member to enter US

DAILYMAIL.COM • 53m ago

By LILLIAN GISSEN, US DEPUTY LIFESTYLE EDITOR Updated: 21:53 20 Oct 2026

First there was NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. Then it was the Jonas Brothers, One Direction and BTS. Now, the latest boyband to skyrocket in popularity is Boy Throb.

At first glance, they look like another typical boyband. Videos shared to their Instagram account, where they have over one million followers, show them dancing and singing in matching pink tracksuits.

But Boy Throb’s story is actually very different from that of most pop music groups, as they’ve been spending the last year fighting to get one of their members into the US.

The group burst onto the scene last October; their first video showed members Evan Papier, 24, Zach Sobania, 24, and Anthony Key, 33, dancing together as they announced: ‘We’re the world’s next biggest boy band.’

They introduced themselves before they played a video from a laptop that showed their fourth member Darshan Magdum, 22, talking all by himself.

‘I’m Darshan Magdum and I’m stuck in India,’ he said.

The band explained that they were renting a house in Hollywood and were ‘so excited to be the new heartthrobs in town.’

‘But we feel incomplete without Darshan,’ they went on.

They claimed that an immigration lawyer told them that if they get enough followers they could get Darshan a visa, before they begged: ‘Will you help bring him to America by following us?’

The video immediately went viral and caught the attention of hundreds of thousands of people across the web, who became fiercely determined in getting Darshan to the States.

After that, the band started posting regular videos that showed them covering popular songs, usually with Magdum joining via a separate video that was edited in.

Within just one month, they had over a million followers on TikTok and 500,000 on Instagram.

Following their meteoric rise to fame, some questioned whether or not their videos were ‘satire,’ but in November 2025, they posted a lengthy message to Instagram insisting they were ‘aspiring to be legitimate artists.’

‘We know our content can seem playful and fun, but comments [asking if we’re “satire”] really affect us, as we are aspiring to be legitimate artists,’ they wrote.

‘We’re not going to let this negativity stop us, in fact, we’ve been actively using it as fuel to prove the haters wrong, which is why we are currently in the process of creating original music.’

‘We want to make this clear: We are not a joke. We are Boy Throb,’ they added.

While speaking to the New York Times, Papier, from Washington, Sobania, from Minnesota, Key, from Indiana, and Magdum, from India, explained that they had met initially on social media and bonded over their shared love of music.

Both Key and Papier had previously tried out for American Idol but didn’t make it past auditions.

The group released its first single in December 2025, called Finger, and within months, they were scoring invites to massive events and appearing on major shows.

Throughout early 2026, they attended the Grammy Awards – where they brought a cardboard cutout of Magdum – were guests on the Zach Sang Show and performed the National Anthem at a Los Angeles Kings game.

They also went on to release five more singles, and held their first official concert at the Bowery Ballroom in May.

In June 2026, they announced that Kesha had signed them to her independent record label, Kesha Records, and in July, they embarked on a mini tour across the US.

But their most monumental moment came on August 3, 2026, when they announced that Magdum’s visa had finally been approved.

They shared a video of Magdum Facetiming the other three members of the group and sharing the news, which prompted them all to scream and jump up and down with excitement.

The group performed for the first time together over the weekend at the American Dream mall in New Jersey and it was certainly an emotional moment for the band, as well as their massive fanbase.

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