Sudanese-American musician Dua Saleh‘s debut album, 2024’s ‘I Should Call Them’, chronicled a queer romance set against a backdrop of dystopia and repression globally. The former NME Cover star’s second outing, ‘Of Earth & Wires’, is similarly conceptual, their preoccupations with turmoil, climate crisis and AI on full display. Yet, this second album also captures Saleh coming into their own as an art-pop star – putting the metaphysical into message music.
On ‘Of Earth & Wires’, Saleh’s perspective is that of a displaced person, seemingly drawn from their own experience migrating to the US as a child refugee when their ethnic Tunjur Muslim family fled Sudan’s civil war. It opens with the break-up song ‘5 Days’ – acoustic guitar strums giving way to industrial percussion and Saleh’s punk hollering, recalling their 2023 loosie ‘Daylight Falls’. Progressive R&B often accentuates aesthetics, experimentation and expression over ‘songs’ – and that was often the case with Saleh’s earlier textural output. However, their songcraft has since assumed form.
As auteur, Saleh’s curation is a communal affair. For ‘I Should Call Them’, they solicited artists who share an affinity for experimental R&B and pop paradigms to collaborate with, such as Gallant and Serpentwithfeet. Saleh continues that organic approach here with Iowan Billy Lemos (SZA) as executive producer, Sudanese-Dutch R&B singer Gaidaa and Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon. The latter appears across three songs, but the sublime folkie ‘Keep Away’, which brings to mind work by The Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald, is a standout.
The musician foregrounds their diasporic heritage on the nostalgic ‘I Do, I Do’, embellished with the Arabic oud, prominent in Sudanese folk tradition, and bearing an ominous idiom (“He who makes some poison / Licks their fingers”). But the song also pays stylistic tribute to Saleh’s adopted Minnesotan hometown, echoing the ’80s Minneapolis sound of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, who famously teamed up with Janet Jackson on her 1986 album ‘Control’. Saleh’s vocals even have Jackson’s distinctive breathiness.
Saleh saves their biggest proclamation for last: ‘All Is Love’, with breezy whistling and a wry lyrical reference to trauma (“Anyway PTSD made me wanna forget it”), is a glitchy paean to idealism in the face of humanitarian suffering. She’s then joined by Grammy-nominated jazz poet Aja Monet, who intones: “The rib of laughter / Echoes of breath / Your voice survives all others / Like a draft of breeze in the veins.”
On ‘Of Earth & Wires’, Saleh reveals a new resoluteness as a singer-songwriter, fully embracing pop but without abandoning their experimental curiosity. Above all, they’re using pop as a medium to further advocate for social equality and justice. Indeed, with their ambitious future grooves, Saleh offers emotional salve for troubled times.
Details
- Record label: Ghostly International
- Release date: May 15, 2026