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“The night,” Arooj Aftab confesses, “is my biggest source of inspiration.” By trial or intuition she’s come to understand that these still moments of cover uniquely enable healing, desire, shelter, love—each essential elements of life and living, of intimate relation to one another. Perhaps because its darkness loosens inhibitions or invites new ways of being, enticing all to leave the day as honestly as they entered it, night welcomes play and searching. So too does Aftab’s voice, its reach and intensity complimenting the sun’s departure. Night Reign (Verve, 2024) is a perfumed, public garden of renewal, peaking the senses with each composition, each turn of phrase, each modulation. Stepping away from, though never forgetting, the grief and loss that animated her Grammy Award-winning track “Mohabbat” and album Vulture Prince (Verve/New Amsterdam, 2021), on which she faced what can too quickly and easily be taken away, Aftab appears here with original music and in yet another form: as bard of everyday possibility, quietude, and life-altering romance.
It’s only appropriate that she begins Night Reign with a treatise on arrival (“Aey Nehin”), which questions when a love will appear and what has kept them so long. In and from this moment of uneasy anticipation, Aftab is guide into the shade of somber dreams and lustful fantasies, defiant flowers and regal scribes. Some of her nights are rain-swept and clean, organically opening paths to clarity; others hold low visibility and request that listeners follow her voice in order to steady their footing and heart. In this world, who knows what we will next encounter or be asked to survive. Whatever it is, be thankful that the season of her singing is perennial. Charged by the improvisational and arranging might of Aftab and featured collaborator James Francies, a revolutionary reinterpretation of the standard “Autumn Leaves” opens into previously unknown corridors. She reinvents space and time; returning, after Vulture Prince, to her chase of the moon and catching it in “Last Night Reprise” (ft. Cautious Clay, Kaki King, and Maeve Gilchrist), and channeling the exquisite whispers shared between the centuries-separated Urdu poet Mah Laqa Bai Chanda and Indian warrior Chand Bibi (“Na Gul”). Together with another longtimecollaborator, Vijay Iyer, Aftab slowly, deliberately walks listeners into a girl’s blossoming world of impending power in “Saaqi,” which resolves into an arrangement of Aftab’s layered harmonies. Listeners have not heard her like this before. Her breath punctuates each entrance, reminding them that her whole body is in these songs and convincing them that they all inhabit the same time and place. Take it in and hold it close.
Then surrender. “I think I’m ready to give into your beauty and let you fall in love with me,” is the twice repeated annotation that propels “Whiskey” into a perfect sky of vulnerability and longing, while “Zameen,” originally sung by the influential Begum Akhtar and featuring Marc Anthony Thompson, stretches for the universe in order to find peace here on earth. Aftab’s invitation to listeners to “bravely journey with this music,” traverses the heavens and heart while forcing all involved to also unflinchingly gaze into the darker recesses of the night, which appear on the album in myriad ways: heavier tones, more cavernous and clandestine locations, wider ruin. Along with Moor Mother and Joel Ross, Aftab transforms “Bolo Na” from a one-time love song into a crisis of faith grounded by an insistent, brooding bassline. A pulsating “Raat Ki Rani” accompanies listeners on an unforgettable ride deep into the dimly lit city—windows down and reservations suspended. Whether the few hours of the night-blooming jasmine’s apex will bring alarm or absolution cannot be predicted but Aftab inspires only trust in the journey.
The majesty of this intrepid work is her voice in ample conspiracy toward a jagged world made softer—promising, even—by tones and tales conceived with others. “I want to make music with and for everybody,” Aftab confidently declares. Night Reign is that chance and its triumph. Join and be made anew.
