Arooj Aftab dreams bigger than ever in 'Night Reign'

Sounding Pakistani Singing musician Arooj Aftab can feel a little like those first few moments of drifting after taking melatonin before bed. The edges of the world bleed like watercolors and your mind weaves new stories from the frayed memories of your day. This makes sense, given that Aftab herself calls the night her “greatest source of inspiration.”

A singer, songwriter and producer who has taken influence from artists as diverse as Billie Holiday, Abida Parveen and Jeff Buckley, 39-year-old Aftab has spent her career dreamily straddling the boundaries between jazz, pop and classical music. A track on her 2021 album, Vulture Prince, won a Grammy for Best World Music Performance, an accolade that limits the scope of what he does. Last year, he teamed up with pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily for the wonderfully experimental Love in Exile, one of the best albums of 2023.

Aftab's new LP, night kingdom, he finds her to have even more range than usual. Iyer returns to lay delicate keys almost Disney-like in the water-cool flow of 'Saaqi'. Poet and experimental musician Moor Mother spits bars about the tenuous nature of reality in a fucked-up world on the devastating “Bola Na,” and Cautious Clay (flute), Kaki King (guitar) and Elvis Costello (Wurlitzer) revamp a Rumi. -inspired piece by Vulture Prince on the beautifully tumultuous “Last Night Reprise.”

Aftab also goes to the well of tradition more than once on this record—turning the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” into an almost foreboding nightscape, or shaping the words of 18th-century Urdu musician and poet Mah Laqa Bai into a crystalline yet triumphant track that feels like sleeping next to your lover in “Na Gul”. This thread of poetic love is sewn throughout the LP — it glides like silk on album opener “Aey Nehin,” floats like an intoxicating scent on “Raat Ki Rani,” and curls like a cat on the verdant “Zameen,” featuring multi-instrumentalist Marc Anthony Thompson.

“Whiskey,” however—one of the only English-language tracks—feels more personal, like a dream more easily evoked than described. Mixing strings and soft sounds of tides coming ashore, the track sees Aftab surrender to love as her lover drowns drunk on her shoulder and she discovers that she is “ready to give in to your beauty and let you fall in love with her mine.” It's a unique moment of individual bliss, but anyone in the throes of new love will relate. Such is the power of Aftab's unique sonic vision. She has worlds in her voice as intimate and expansive as her own imagination.