Some songs sound like soundtracks. The more one listens to Arooj Aftab’s music and how it’s evolving with each new release, the more one notices how deeply atmospheric her music is becoming.

Her latest release To Remain/To Return, in which she collaborates with Vijay Ayer (an American composer, pianist, band-leader, producer and writer based in New York City) and Shahzad Ismaily (an American musician, composer, recording engineer and producer with Pakistani heritage), carries that same hypnotic, haunting, moody, almost brooding quality that has become somewhat of her signature.

It’s a vibe she’s carried forward from the days she used to upload rough recordings of her covers online, roughly two decades ago. How time flies.

Now, she is the first Pakistani to perform at the Grammys. Earlier this year, Arooj Aftab performed her then-nominated song, Udherro Na, her collaboration with Anoushka Shankar, at global music’s biggest stage. The previous year, in 2022, she was nominated in two categories: Best New Artist and Best Global Performance for her single Mohabbat, which incorporates three couplets from Hafeez Hoshiarpuri’s famous ghazal. She ended up winning a Grammy for Mohabbat, becoming the first Pakistani to ever be bestowed that honour.

Arooj Aftab’s latest release, To Remain/To Return, may not be everyone’s cup of tea but it follows the trajectory of her music perfectly

Since then, she’s really spread her wings. One even caught an update with the artist producing orchestral music. She has really come far and we couldn’t be prouder.

But it didn’t come easy to Arooj. She’s been at it for years. From putting up clips of her music online way back in 2001-2002, before there was even a Facebook or Instagram, to going viral for her cover of Aamir Zaki’s iconic song Mera Pyaar and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

She then received the Steve Vai scholarship at Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 2005, where she formally studied music production and engineering as well as jazz composition. After graduating, she continued to live and work in the United States and, in the midst of all of this, released three albums — Bird Under Water (2014), Siren Islands (2018) and Vulture Prince (2021) — while collaborating with other artists and working full time as an audio engineer to pay for her music.

Behind these Grammy nods was years of sweat, blood and hard work. And it’s paid off.

Arooj Aftab is currently based in New York, a melting pot of different cultures, and it provides her with both the environment needed to do the kind of music she wants to and the audience for it. I’m not entirely sure if this kind of new-age experimentation would strike a chord with audiences back home. But you never know.

Listening to her latest single, I can’t help but think that her music is not everyone’s cup of tea. Especially the traditionalists. It sometimes feels like we/South Asians aren’t her primary audience — it’s the goras [foreigners] she’s producing for.

While the instrumentation, arrangement, overall production and vocal delivery by the artist is always spot on and often carries a haunting quality to it, lyrically, her songs are… dumbed down or reduced a lot.

Case in point, the song in question, basically has the following lyrics that carry the entire song forward: Ja/ Ja re ja, main/ Main ja, aaaa/ Ab tujh se nahin boloon…

[Go/ Go, I/ I’ll go, come/ I won’t say anything to you]

These are not the kind of lyrics I imagine anyone who is a native speaker of Urdu or Hindi would enjoy particularly. But they are simple enough for someone not familiar with the language to follow somewhat.

With its deep dark intense orchestral broodiness, which takes time to build up through the song, I don’t think To Remain/To Return will be most people’s cup of tea. But it follows the trajectory of Arooj’s music and its evolution perfectly.

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 12th, 2023