After the procedure Mustafa, who lives in Toronto, calls himself a behind-the-scenes pop songwriter (Camila Cabello, The Weeknd), and introduces himself as the lead vocal on his 2021 album when the smoke risesMeanwhile, the folk-leaning singer has become a rare artist willing to wholeheartedly express his support for the liberation of Palestine amid Israel's mass killing of civilians, organizing a series of charity concerts in Gaza featuring artists such as Omar Apollo, Clairo, Daniel Caesar and Earl Sweatshirt.
The 27-year-old singer's debut album, The worldenhancing the harmonious folk music he presented. when the smoke rises With a diverse roster of top-notch collaborators including Rosalía, Aaron Dessner, Jade, and Nicholas Jaar (to name a few), front and center of the mix, amidst acoustic guitars, flutes, ouds, dalasmars, and piano, is Mustafa’s deep, soft, cool voice, which shifts from chanting to whispering and back from line to line, providing the central tension of his music, delivering fractured images of violence and brokenness in moments of mesmerizing beauty (listen to Mustafa’s narrator slapping a skinhead with his ring on “Gaza Calling”).
On his debut album, Mustafa’s softly folky poems tackle mental health crises and racist criminal justice systems, and the result is a treatise on faith, rage, despair, and grief on both the micro level (“Nouri”) and the macro level (“Gaza Calling”). But this time, the singer also makes clear his ambivalence about his rapidly developing reputation as a poet of grief: When he sings “All he did/Was a platform for pain” on “What Happened, Mohammed?” it’s as if he’s singing about his weariness with the project he’s involved in while telling his own vividly drawn story of how aging creates distance between old friends.
With its rich melody and simple melodies, The world “Imaan” is also an amalgamation of Mustafa’s pop sensibility: the songwriter who provides the lead verse on “Imaan” or the gorgeous verse on “Name of God” that opens the album (“In that warm winter/ I withered/ I just want to get better”) is actually the songwriter who has written tunes for Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber.
One of the album’s most poignant moments comes near the end, in “Beauty, the End,” where Mustafa sings over a string of instrumentals. He recounts his past, filled with obedience and rule-breaking, peace and violence, until he arrives at a conclusion that seems to haunt him the moment he says it out loud: “I only see beauty when it begins to end,” Mustafa sings.
