SONGS OF DEVOTION
WE get a brief glance of Arooj Aftab’s home base – a lightfilled room in a shared brownstone in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy, borrowed double bass propped against the wall – before she politely asks to switch the camera off. It’s still early, and the singer is feeling a little worse for wear following a heavy session at a local bar the previous evening. “It was a really warm day after five months of winter,” she pleads. “So we just lost our minds and went out and drank so much gin for absolutely no reason.”
As it turns out, this is not an uncommon occurrence for Aftab. “I’m the biggest hedonist,” she admits. “I love being social, I love talking to people, I love just being out and about. I’m inspired by the sheer energy of people saying crazy shit to each other. I think that solitude, for some people, helps them clear their mind and do incredible things. But for me, I prefer being in the middle of a big moving organism. Being in the centre of many energies is inspiring to me.”
This confession may come as a surprise to those who have recently found solace in Aftab’s fantastic 2021 album, . A stunning and largely beatless affair that masterfully blends Sufi devotional music with smoky jazz and blues, ambient soundscapes and Buckley-esque acoustic flourishes, it transmits a sense of deep spiritual yearning and rarified, otherworldly calm. Reviews praised the album in awed, quasi-religious terms: it was “mesmerising”, “mystical”, “rhapsodic”. Suffice to say it is pretty much the exact opposite of the music you might expect to hear bubbling up and Biggie Smalls’ rap battles, a place where Aftab admits it’s tricky to record at home because of the constant blare of “airplanes and sirens and kids playing in the street”. Still, she wouldn’t have it any other way.
