Arooj Aftab just wants to have fun

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they do things that are indicative of fun,” says Arooj Aftab, very earnestly, in the flat staccato rhythm of a tester.

The Pakistan-born, Berklee-educated, Brooklyn-based musician talks about the song on her new album, night kingdom, out May 31: the double vocals, fresh harmonies and especially the Auto-Tune that wraps her voice on the single “Raat Ki Rani” and lends it that spectral pop aura. Aftab remembers asking the mixing engineer, “Can you please put, like, loads of T-Pain Auto-Tune on this and let's see how it sounds?”

She and her mechanic were “shocked” by how much they liked it.

“So I said, 'Fine, let me have my Cher/James Blake/Imogen Heap/T-Pain moment,'” Aftab, 39, continues. “I want people to know that this is not just a place to park your sadness, it's not something to just meditate on — 'Oh, Arooj, it's soooo transcendent.' Please, it's so boring.”

It's a late afternoon in early May, and Aftab and I have spent the last hour at a Brooklyn bar specializing in Japanese whiskey, a place chosen as a not-so-subtle nod to her song “Whiskey,” another feature of Night Kingdom. The premise was that we could try the products as we speak, but we're ruining the piece by both choosing to abstain. Aftab opts for the iced coffee and I'm glad I stick with water. It may be after 5pm, and the after-work crowd is mingling as we chat, but the sun is still high and strong, streaming through the large, lonely window to the back of the bar where we sit. The night seems far away.

The assumptions and expectations that Aftab wanted to subvert with her new album stem from her famous effort in 2021, Vulture Prince. It was a remarkable record, largely about grief, made after the death of close friend and younger brother Aftab in 2018. He spent years working on the album, trying to “unlock that mystery of a sound” that was stuck in his head her. Working mainly with guitar, upright bass and lots of harp, Aftab composed songs that explored jazz, classical and South Asian folk music, combining them with original lyrics and verses drawn from Urdu ghazals, a genre of poetry steeped in longing.

Vulture Prince propelled Aftab from a professional artist in a day's work to a Grammy winner – she was the first Pakistani artist to win one – prominently in Barack Obama's summer playlist. Her team grew with her stature. signed to Verve and spent the next few years touring the world in support of both Vulture Prince and her 2023 collaboration with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile. Amidst all this came the inevitable murmurs from everyone around her: “Oh my god, the sequel!”

“I was really worried about it Vulture Prince continuously, and it has to be better, or at least the same… or at least it has to really not be crap,” Aftab says with a laugh. “You know, when you have a record that people really love, you're kind of screwed, because the next one has to be just as good or better. And that's really scary. My mind was occupied with how to take the sound farther.”

He continues: “When you blow up, your cute art becomes a small business. You don't just write about your feelings anymore. It means a lot more, the stakes are higher. The artist employs almost everyone, from managers to bookers — you're responsible for continuing to create something good. I wanted to run away from it, but then it became real.”

Aftab originally planned to make an album focusing on the poetry of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, an 18th/19th century courtesan, political adviser and warrior who was also the first female Urdu poet to publish a collection of her own work. No one had set her poems to music before, and Aftab was up for the challenge, until it began to feel more like a creative imposition than a rousing prompt. So she let go of the larger concept, kept what made sense (Chanda's poems form the basis of two songs, “Na Gul” and “Saaqi”) and opened herself up to everything.

Night Kingdom includes interjections of the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” and Shamim Jaipuri's ghazal 'Zameen', made famous by the great Indian singer Begum Akhtar. (“She's like my Billie Holiday, so I have to have my girl there,” Aftab says.) Opener “Aey Nehim” is based on an improvised poem Aftab saw her friend, Pakistani actress Yasra Rizvi, recite on Instagram. “There's a looseness, a fun and a non-seriousness to it that actually ends up being very beautiful—it's not contrived at all,” says Aftab. “It's one of my favorite songs on the record.”

Aftab brought out a few songs from her own catalog, including “Whiskey,” a song she wrote in college, and “Bolo Na,” which she wrote as a teenager. The latter was “one of those awful terrible songs” that he thought would be locked away forever, but then it went so well with a heavy drum and bass groove, and he had found new meaning in his teenage longing for love: “It's like , tell me you love me, lead me, send me mixed signals. As an adult, everything is messed up, the world is crazy, everything is going to be lost, we are in a world war, the planet is dying. Well, this song now I'm just angry. I say, 'Tell me if you love me,' but I know you're lying.”

The sound of it Night Kingdom based on Vulture Prince, and features many of the same players, including close collaborators such as harpist Maeve Gilchrist and bassist Petros Klabanis. Wanting the songs to groove more, she recruited experienced percussionist Jamey Haddad for several songs, and even opened her heart to her least favorite instrument, the piano. (“It's fucking so corny,” Aftab groans, before acknowledging that recording and touring an entire album with Iyer, an acclaimed pianist, helped her realize it's not so bad.”) Philly poet and artist Moor Mother he delivers a guest verse on “Bolo Na” and if you peruse the credits carefully, you'll spot an occasional clip of Elvis Costello playing the Wurlitzer on “Last Night Reprise.”

Costello became a fan after finding it Vulture Prince during a period of mourning; he reached out to Aftab, and the two became fast friends: “He's the cutest, sweetest person,” says Aftab. “Whenever I'm hanging out with him, I'm still low-key crazy, but he's such a nice guy and it's nice to see normalcy in people.”

Aftab is perhaps most animated when discussing the thrills and sonic possibilities that come from putting different musicians, with different skill sets and personalities, in a room together – something she embraced as an important part of overcoming the pressures of monitoring Vulture Prince. “People aren't going to say 'no' if you pick up the phone and call,” he says. “You can expand your sound, you have the access.”

Embracing that kind of trust in the community makes perfect sense for an extrovert like Aftab. “I like hanging out, meeting new people and that fuels my creativity,” she says. And there's no better time for all of this than at night — especially if you're a touring musician. “The nightlife of the tour, even though it's so chaotic, so hectic, so crowded, I feel like there's a calmness to it all,” he adds. “I can be alone with my thoughts, I can write, I can be creative in some way. Less than when I was back in Brooklyn doing interviews and going to the dentist.”

Three years of intense touring behind Vulture Prince and Love in Exile has changed it a bit. After the show, Aftab now heads straight for the hotel, not because she's ready to go out—she's probably still “very disappointed” about the show—but because she knows herself so well: “No one stops me with a beer, Don “Look at me, because then I'll be hanging out and all of a sudden it's four in the morning, and the next day is going to be crap.”

In one such hotel, somewhere in the world, Aftab honestly can't remember where, she came up with the melody and hook for a song about a person whose charms are matched only by the fragrant night jasmine – a flower known in Urdu as 'Raat Ki Rani ”, which translates to “Queen of the Night”. At first, she wasn't sure where to take the song next, so she ran it through a couple of friends who were both Urdu writers and speakers, but they couldn't come up with anything.

Finally, Aftab just shrugged and thought, “Well, maybe he doesn't have to go anywhere. It's like Nile Rodgers says — we all want to get to the hook, so let's get to the hook. The song is just the hook.”

And what's more fun than a hook? Well, maybe a hook sung with Auto-Tune.