Night Reign - Arooj Aftab (2024)

Aftab mixes her Pakistani roots with her Berklee-trained compositional education and the sense of anything-goes genre sampling that we see with a lot of Brooklyn artists.

Her approach is meditative and deliberate. This is loosely a concept album about the character of the night, and it feels like each track evokes a different nuance of that.

We hear her sing in English and Urdu, both original lyrics and settings of classical urdu poetry. She reworks her own track Last Night from a previous album, adding the same nocturnal vibe as the other tracks.

There is so much here, it’s hard to know what to talk about. A wonderful listen.