Lounge
Arooj Aftab's album 'Night Reign' explores love, longing, solitude and intimacy
Summary
The Pakistani artist's album is a musical exploration of the night's themes, with a blend of folk-jazz elements
Every day is born anew, but the night itself is ancient. We may now live in an age of reason and science, but the night reminds us of the times when humanity still believed in magic and demons, when gods and monsters walked the earth under the cover of its all-encompassing darkness. Stare into the night sky long enough, and you may just get a glimpse of the ineffable.
Perhaps that’s why the night has been such a beloved muse for poets and musicians across the ages. Percy Shelley was so enchanted by it that he personified it in a poem, making it the object of his yearning. Robert Frost saw in it a metaphor for his depression, and a companion for his solitude. Closer home, generations of Urdu poets have immortalised the night of separation—shab-e-hijr—in their ghazals.
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Brooklyn-via-Lahore singer and composer Arooj Aftab channels this rich semiotic tradition (among others) on her fourth solo album Night Reign, a loose concept album about the night and all it symbolises—love, longing, solitude, intimacy, and a little Bacchanalian excess. Gently finger-plucked guitar, shimmering harp, percussive bass and nimble electric piano runs come together in a spectral folk-jazz filigree, with Aftab’s sumptuous contralto soaring to fill the spaces in between, shading the night in broad brushstrokes of heartbreak and ecstasy.
Aftab’s music exists in a liminal space between the traditional and the contemporary, between East and West, laying claim to multiple cultural inheritances without privileging one over the other. It’s an approach that reflects her own multi-hyphenated identity. She was born in Saudi Arabia and only moved home to Pakistan when she was 11, where she fell in love with the Sufi devotional music of ghazal connoisseur Begum Akhtar and the soulful jazz of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday.
Her first brush with fame came in the early 2000s, when she put out a charming, deeply intimate 10-minute long cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which went viral on the desi internet. The Pakistani indie scene of the time was in the middle of a remarkably febrile, experimental phase, and Aftab stood out as one of its more unique and promising voices. But it was still a fledgling scene, with little infrastructure and no proven pathway to success, so she moved to Boston in 2005 to study music production and engineering. A few years later, she shifted base to New York, where she immersed herself in the city’s jazz scene.
All these disparate influences come together to create a sound that is decidedly her own, a multicultural melange that she moulds into coherence with the power of her will, and an obsessive attention to intricate detail. Over her first couple of proper releases—2015’s Bird Under Water, 2018’s Siren Islands—she mapped out the sonic terrain she would call her own, experimenting with ghazal folk and dreamy ambient soundscapes, before distilling her sound to its essence on 2021’s haunting, ethereal Vulture Prince.
That album, written in the wake of her brother’s death, is an exquisite exploration of grief and loss, Aftab’s voice soaked in a sorrow that runs bone-deep. Though she largely sings in Urdu, drawing deeply from the well of ghazal poetry, the emotional valence of her vocals—and the hypnotic charm of her arrangements—transcends linguistic and cultural barriers to touch you deeply in the soul. Earning two Grammy nominations—and one win, Best Global Music Performance—Vulture Prince catapulted Aftab from independent musician to bona fide star.
Night Reign builds on the sparse, tense atmospherics and melismatic melancholia of Vulture Prince, but on this one her emotional palette is a little brighter, the music’s pulse running just a little bit quicker.
Lead single Raat Ki Rani is the closest she’s ever gotten to a dance-floor bop, an infectiously propulsive ballad inspired by the rhythms of Brazilian maracatu. Aftab’s voice embodies the beguiling charm of the song’s namesake (a night-blooming jasmine), draped in Auto-Tune that gives it an otherworldly, uncanny-valley vibe. Whiskey—another single—hints at the messy thrills of a new romance, its shimmering synths and chromatic keys evoking a smoky jazz bar.
Autumn Leaves (feat. James Francies) is a phantasmal rework of the 1945 jazz standard torch song. It’s a testament to Aftab’s quiet confidence in her own skills that she attempts a new take on a song that’s—as Pitchfork’s Andy Cush puts it—jazz’s Smoke On The Water, covered by everyone from Miles Davis and Eric Clapton to your local bar band. And it’s a testament to her formidable talent that she succeeds, moulding the song’s gently mournful melody into jagged shapes and ghostly reveries.
But the album’s biggest moments still come from Aftab’s darker songs, channelling the ghazal’s desolate subcontinental blues. On Bolo Na, which features an intense, reality-shifting spoken word bit by experimental musician Moor Mother, she takes an old love song and transforms it into a quietly damning indictment of contemporary politics and society. It’s hulking, portentous bass moves with menace, locked into that moment where grief transforms into rage.
And then there’s Na Gul, one of Aftab’s most conceptually ambitious songs and one that encapsulates the essence of her entire musical project. The song takes its lyrics from a poem by the 18th century Hyderabadi poet and courtesan Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. Wistful harp melodies float like smoke over tense, terse piano chords, as Aftab sings in mesmerising tones both sacred and sensual. She brings the ghosts of the subcontinental past in conversation with her global contemporary influences to create a new musical language that is at once otherworldly and familiar. Night Reign is a meisterwerk of musical alchemy, establishing Aftab’s reputation as one of contemporary music’s most talented enchantresses.
Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.
