Arooj Aftab ‘10 was a young teenager in Lahore, Pakistan,
Aftab and I spoke during a short break between tour legs. The conversation ranged widely, from her childhood influences to her path through Berklee, the high stakes of making a living as an artist, the importance of finding the right collab - orators, and much more. Her cool confidence suf - fused every subject, as did a charming tendency to universalize parts of her story—“it’s like your first instinct to cover a song”—turning me into you, and extending deeply personal truths across divi- sions of identity, experience, style, and culture. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You’ve said you want to make music with and for everybody. Your sound is very specific and rooted in traditions that may be new to some listeners, yet it resonates widely. When you’re making music, are you thinking about your audience, or does that broader connection emerge naturally from expressing yourself? I have been asked a lot, "Who is it for and where is it coming from, and what have you studied and how did you get to this point?" The answer is always a little bit the same: it's a really personal music, and it's for everybody . . . because it's personal, because of my journey in jazz and my love for acoustic guitar, folk music, and R&B, and the blues, and growing up in Pakistan—having those melodies and those tra- ditions, even though I'm not classically trained and I couldn't tell you anything about any sort of South Asian traditional music. It's a combination of all the things that I love. And it's a very unpretentious com- bination, I hope. I strive for the music to feel natural, to feel like this is the product of somebody's broad interests who happens to be a musician. It's all of the things all at once. And like you said, it is also very specific, because it's a rare thing that hasn't exactly been executed before in this way. Which makes it really exciting. I don't make music for audi- ences. I make the music that I want to hear that I can't find anywhere. I wanted to hear this music for myself, and I couldn't find it anywhere, so I had to make it. How did growing up in Pakistan surrounded by music affect you? I grew up in a house where everybody loved music a lot, in particular, but also beauty and art, and my mom's also super into nutrition and food. They were very intentional about the things that they would do, and they would live their life in this way that prioritized listening to music and watching good TV. It wasn't about it being a luxury; it was about it being what we need. I think that happens to come from them being from a city like Lahore, which is such a romantic place, especially when they were growing up there. That’s just part of the culture from their time. And they put that into us. Me and my siblings just thought it was extremely normal to be so tuned in.
when her relationship to music started to evolve. She started imagining changing the songs she was listening to—how she might tweak the bass line or rework the melody. "It's like your first impulse to cover a song: I want to hear that in my voice," she told me. "I wanted to change the actual arrangement, which is insane for a 13-year-old to think. Sometimes it just feels like music can be your destiny, because there's no way to explain why I would feel that way. I had no tools or any training to know that's even a thing. But I innately felt that I wanted to." In the years since those early musical instincts emerged, a totally singular career has unscrolled. After beginning her music education in Pakistan through Berkleemusic.com (the precursor to Berklee Online), Aftab came to Boston to study on campus at Berklee, where she earned a degree in music pro- duction and engineering. From Berklee, she moved to New York City, and over the following decade she staked out her sound in the local scene and on two excellent albums, 2015’s acoustic-driven Bird Under Water and 2018’s ambient electronic Siren Islands. Her 2021 breakout album, Vulture Prince , earned her a Grammy Award in the Best Global Music Per- formance category for the song “Mohabbat,” which was also listed on President Barack Obama’s annual summer playlist. After Vulture Prince , Aftab signed to Verve Records, the historic Universal Music Group label home to both jazz legends and genre-defying contemporary acts. Today she stands as one of contemporary music’s most distinctive yet least definable artists. If you’ve heard any of her projects, you know the sound instantly: that voice like thick smoke weav- ing slowly upward, joining a shapeshifting cloud of acoustic textures, South Asian folk and classical tones, jazz improvisations, and minimalist electron- ics. But the resulting compositions are anything but predictable. They can be meditative and oblique, like her 2023 collaboration with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile . They can also stun with their immediacy, like the alluring earworm “Raat Ki Rani,” the lead single from 2024’s Night Reign , remixed by both the jammy psych-rockers Khruangbin and indie-electronic duo Sylvan Esso. Both projects were nominated for Grammys. One of the most striking aspects of Aftab’s work is how that combination of so many hyper-specific influences can sound so much like an invitation. When I asked Christiane Karam, one of her former instructors, about this quality in Aftab’s music, she explained, “We're wired to experience anything that's not familiar as a threat, and to shy away from it. This is why successful fusion artists are just mirac- ulous, because what they're doing is they're making the unfamiliar familiar enough that we're willing to lend an ear.”
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