Mustafa’s ‘Dunya’ is a Beautiful Treatise on Rage and Religion

After making a identify for himself as a behind-the-scenes pop songwriter (Camila Cabello, the Weeknd), Toronto-based Mustafa launched himself as a main voice with 2021’s When Smoke Rises, an EP-length meditation on mourning after the dying of his late good friend, the rapper Smoke Dawg. Within the meantime, the folk-leaning singer has grow to be a uncommon artist keen to wholeheartedly voice their assist for Palestinian liberation amidst Israel’s mass killing of civilians, organizing a sequence of Gaza profit live shows that includes artists like Omar Apollo, Clairo, Daniel Caesar and Earl Sweatshirt.

The 27 year-old singer’s debut album, Dunya, furthers the textured people music he launched on When Smoke Rises with a listing of various A-list collaborators like Rosalía, Aaron Dessner, JID and Nicolas Jaar, (to call just a few). Rightly entrance and heart within the combine, amidst the acoustic guitars, flutes ouds, dulcimers and pianos, is Mustafa’s soul-deep voice, which is each clean and weathered, which switches from croon to whisper then again from one line to the following, and which offers his music’s central rigidity of delivering shattered imagery of violence and brokenness in moments of arresting magnificence (Take heed to Mustafa’s narrator element bashing a skinhead along with his ring on “Gaza is Calling”). 

On his debut LP, Mustafa’s mild people poems element psychological well being crises and racialized felony justice techniques, and the result’s a treatise on religion, rage, despair and grief each micro (“Nouri”) and macro (“Gaza is Calling”). This time round, nonetheless, the singer additionally makes clear his ambivalence about his rapidly-developing popularity as a poet laureate of anguish: When he sings “All that it did/was platform the ache,” on “What Occurred, Mohamed?” it seems like he’s singing about his personal weariness with the mission he’s participating in as he spins his vividly rendered story of the best way growing old creates distance between outdated pals.

With its wealthy melody and understated hooks, Dunya is, too, a merging of Mustfa’s pop sensibility: The songwriter delivering the hook on “Imaan” or the attractive alliterative chorus of album-opener “Title of God” (“in that heat winter/I withered/I simply wish to get higher”), may be very a lot the songwriter who’s penned tunes for Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber. 

One of many document’s most haunting moments comes in the direction of its conclusion, on “Magnificence, finish,” simply Mustafa singing over some acoustic instrumentation. He’s detailing a previous of obedience and rule-breaking, of peace and violence, till he arrives at a conclusion he appears haunted by the second he says it out loud: “I solely see magnificence,” Mustafa coos, “when it begins to finish.”